Show Formulas in Excel

Normally, Excel displays the result of formula calculations. In this lesson, You will find a few ways how you can display formulas in Excel.

Formula Bar

If you want to find out what formula is used in the selected cell, just click it and the formula will be displayed in the formula bar.

A single apostrophe

When you work with formulas, sometimes they can become long and complicated. In such a case, a good way to deal with this problem is to place a single apostrophe in front of a formula. It will be treated as text, so even the broken formula can be fixed later.

You can also use a bit different ways to keep a formula as text. For example, instead of using an apostrophe, you can delete the equal sign (=).

Displaying formulas inside a worksheet

If you have a more complicated example, you may want to see how formulas relate to each other.

The following example shows a bunch of numbers that are summed inside a column and row.

Of course, it’s not evident just by looking at the example. You can display formulas by choosing Formulas >> Formula Auditing >> Show Formulas.

You can also use the following keyboard shortcut.

Press CTRL + ` (grave accent)

You can set this option for multiple worksheets by going to File >> Options >> Advanced >> Display options for this worksheet >> Show formulas in cells instead of their calculated results.

Tomasz Decker is an Excel specialist, skilled in data analysis and financial modeling.