10 obscure Excel tricks that can expedite common chores

by Jeff Davis | 05-02-07

Tags: screenshots, excel, tips, Mouse, Formula, Window, Auditing, Data, Toolbar, Data Entry, Data Mining, Row, Microsoft Excel 2003, Column, E-mail, Font, Spreadsheet, Cell, Microsoft Office, Office suites, SOFTWARE

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4: Press [Ctrl]~ to display formulas so you can troubleshoot or debug them

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If you wanted to troubleshoot a formula in early versions of Excel, you had to click on the cell containing the formula and look at the formula itself in the Formula Bar. In more recent versions of Excel, you can display your formulas by pressing [Ctrl]~. If you want to view the dependent cells for a particular cell, select it before you press [Ctrl]~.

To demonstrate this feature, open any worksheet that contains at least one formula and press [Ctrl]~. Our sample sheet contains two SUM functions. This screenshot shows our sheet after we selected cell B2 and then pressed [Ctrl]~. Notice that when you press this key combination, Excel 2003 also displays the Formula Auditing toolbar.