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Sometime when you are confronted with a new worksheet or a worksheet you haven't
seen, maybe never, or it's been a long time, you are concerned sometimes with
understanding the scope of a worksheet, trying to figure out what's going on.
And one of the things that would be really useful would be to see the actual
formulas instead of the formula results. Now, you would like to be able to do that
on a cell-by-cell basis, but Excel does have a great feature where you can convert
all formulas to actually display them rather than the results.
Now, for example, if I happen to click on a cell here, a very simple formula
here in cell B10, you can see it in the formula bar.
But I might want to see other formulas at the same time, and rather than going
to each cell and temporarily turning it into text, which would be really time
consuming, there is a nice fast way to do this, and there is a great keystroke
shortcut for it, but you are unlikely to know the keystroke shortcut.
It's kind of buried. And you will notice and see one or two characters,
and they are usually together on the same key on your keyboard.
Usually this key is above the Tab key, to the left of the number 1 key and
below the Escape key. If you hold down Ctrl and hit that key, the
symbol on top is usually called tilde. It's the character that we often see above
the letter N in certain Spanish words. The other character is sort of a little apostrophe
looking character is sometimes referred to as accent grave, as
is used in certain French letters, usually over e.
The point is hold down Ctrl and hit that key, and the worksheet will change
substantially in appearance. The most obvious difference is the column
widths have all been doubled, but wherever there were formulas, you see the
actual formula instead of the result. So a quick look at cell B7 here shows the
formula, but not the answer. Now fortunately, this control, whatever we
want to call it, maybe call it Ctrl+Tilde, maybe you call it Ctrl+Accent.
Don't use the Shift key. In any case, when you use the same combination
again, it toggles back to the regular display.
So think of it as a toggle button, a toggle switch.
Anytime you hit Ctrl with this other character, you either double the width of
all columns and expose formulas, or you return to the normal view.
And when it is in this view, note also that other cells with values have the
values automatically left aligned, as is the text entries.
So it looks a little bit different, but it certainly does no damage, and better
yet, it certainly is of value to see those formulas.
Here is something else you might consider doing when you're viewing the
information like this. I had mentioned that the columns are twice
as wide. Now, here and there that's handy and helpful,
as it might be in Column B, but in Column A it's not.
What you might want to consider doing here is actually printing this.
So if you go to Ctrl+F2, that's a quick way for Print Preview.
Ctrl+F2, that may or may not be what you want to see.
I am going to click on this to zoom in, but if you were looking at this and
wanted to print it, don't overlook the Page Setup option that allows you, on the
Sheet tab, to show gridlines, as well as row and column headings.
Now, those are often not checked and so you don't typically see them.
But you can see in the background here how even though that's not super clear,
we are not trying to read it, but the columns are twice as wide, and we see
formulas wherever they appear, just as we're viewing it on the screen.
What you might do to make this a little bit better, click in the upper left
corner, double-click one of the boundaries between column letters, readjust
those column widths again, and then again, take a look at your Print
Preview with Ctrl+F2. You will decide, based on other formulas,
whether that's appropriate or not, but it could serve as a source of documentation.
The main point, however, is by choosing this option of simply hitting Ctrl with
that other key, you can quickly switch modes. Now, I had readjusted the column widths, so
we would want to do this again when it's back in normal view again, probably.
Click there, double-click here. You can also get to this feature in the ribbon
if you click the Formulas tab, and in the Formula Auditing group you will
see Show Formulas. And as you have noted in Excel 2007, if you
linger over this feature here, the command Show Formulas, you will see that same
keystroke shortcut. Notice how easy it would be to look at that
and just sort of read through it and not have it registered for you.
You can barely see that little symbol out there under Show Formulas, but
that's the same feature. I think it's handier with the keystroke shortcut,
but you do have it here as well. It certainly is going to give you that handle
on a worksheet to figure out what's going on, to expose those formulas.