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Totals do not add up properly

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    Totals do not add up properly

    Hello. I have written a spreadsheet with three sheets (see attached) You can see in sheet 3 ('totals') some formulas are displaying as text, and column AC has a 6 in which is not reflected in the total in AC12. If one total is not adding up properly it makes you wonder about all the others too!

    I should mention I get a circular error message when I open the file, but when I ran the formula check tab thingy it said it was OK: I think that error just appears because Excel expects my formula to select cells next to the ones I selected but I don't want those cells. So I am ignoring that.

    Thanks!
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    Last edited by Minnowonsay; 06-18-2014 at 12:22 PM. Reason: typo

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    Re: Totals do not add up properly

    Those cells are formatted as Text. The easiest way to fix it is to select the column (one column at a time) and do "Text to Columns" (Data tab) and then click "Finish"
    Does that work for you?
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    Re: Totals do not add up properly

    Thank you very much, ChemistB. I tried this and tried to reformat all my columns (since I didn't know which ones were affected) but Excel kept crashing and in the end my company antivirus software kicked in and complained about suspicious behaviour. I think the moral of this tale is that Excel columns should be consistent (I had extra columns after May which the system did not seem to be able to cope with hence 'circular reference' error message.)

    Your solution solved the problem with the formulas displaying as text, thank you, however there was still a 6 in totals sheet column AC3 which did not add up in the column below (AC12) so I don't know what that problem is. Probably I'd better start again with a consistent format.

    I should mention that when I selected "text to column" the program gave me choice between Comma delimited and something else so I selected comma delimited.

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    Re: Totals do not add up properly

    Hi,

    You have at least one circular reference in Y2 on Sheet 2. This formula (
    Formula: copy to clipboard
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    ) is of course referencing itself hence the circular argument. All similar formulae are of course the same.

    As a general point I suspect you really need to reconsider your whole layout so that you have a 'normalised' 2 dimensional table that could be used by a Pivot table, or indeed any other functions.

    So consider a single sheet database where you have columns for

    Date
    Book types (currently column A) (you could set up a drop down data validation list)
    Staff Type - i.e. populated with 1 or 2 (from data validation list)
    FT Type i.e. populated with "FT", "Local FT", "NFT" and presumaby "bibs" (from data validation list
    Numbers

    Without knowing your process and overall intention it's a little difficult to comment further
    Richard Buttrey

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    If any of the responses have helped then please consider rating them by clicking the small star icon below the post.

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    Re: Totals do not add up properly

    Dear all,
    Thanks for your advice, I have now completely recreated the spreadsheet along the lines advised and my new one works perfectly and I've learned a lot in the process.

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