Why are my spreadsheets full of formulae instead of useful data?

Q  At some point in the past couple of weeks, something has happened to my Excel setup and it is affecting all my spreadsheets. Now, rather than displaying the values of cells, my matrices are a sea of formulae. I have no idea what’s happened but it has made my spreadsheets useless. Any ideas?
Nelson Porter

A  Yes, we have an idea because it’s a problem that plagues the Computeractive planning spreadsheet, which is shared by all staff: all it takes is one wayward keypress and our spreadsheet is saved with all the formulae showing, inevitably leading to confusion for some other colleague.

Fortunately, the answer is simple – to toggle the display of formulae or values in cells, just use the keyboard shortcut Control (Ctrl) and `.

We’re aware that in print the second part of that shortcut is going to be hard to decipher so, just to be clear, it indicates the key bearing the grave accent. On most standard keyboard layouts, this is the key that sits just to the left of the 1 and in between the Tab and Escape (Esc) keys.

On most British keyboards, this same key additionally carries a vertical pipe symbol and the notation for the logic operator NOT, which looks like a geometric hook.