Display all excel formulas

How to Show Formulas in Excel

How to Display Formulas in Excel

You can better understand what’s going on in your workbooks by showing and highlighting all the formulas in a sheet.

Show/Hide Formulas

By default, Excel displays the results of formulas in the worksheet instead of showing the actual formulas. However, you can choose to have Excel display the formulas so you can see how they’re put together.

1. Click the Formulas tab.
2. Click the Show Formulas button.

Formulas are displayed in the worksheet and the columns widen to accommodate the formulas, if necessary.

If you display formulas and then select a cell that contains a formula, colored lines appear around cells that are referenced by the formula.

Click the Show Formulas button again to hide the formulas.

Formulas are no longer displayed and the columns return to their original sizes.

Highlight Formulas

If you don’t want to see the actual formulas, but want to know which cells contain them, highlight cells with formulas instead.

1. Click the Home tab.
2. Click the Find & Select button.
3. Select Formulas.

Any cells that contain a formula are highlighted; however, this doesn’t change the cell formatting. When you click any other cell in the worksheet, the highlighted cells are unselected.

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See all Formulas

September 06, 2017 — by Bill Jelen

Excel usually shows you the results of your formulas. What if you would rather see all of the formulas? This article will show you the simple Show Formulas mode.

You inherit a spreadsheet from a former co-worker. You need to figure out how the calculations work. You could visit each cell one at a time and look at the formula in the formula bar. Or, you could quickly toggle between pressing F2 and Esc to see the formula right in the cell.

Sample Data Set

But there is a faster way. On most U.S. keyboards, just below the Esc key is a key with two accent characters: the tilde from Spanish and the grave accent from French. It is an odd key. I don’t know how I would ever use this key to actually type Piñata or Café.

The Faster Way

If you hold down Ctrl and this key, you toggle into something called Show Formulas mode. Each column gets wider, and you see all of the formulas.

Show Formulas Mode

This gives you a view of all the formulas at once. It is great for spotting “plug” numbers or when someone added the totals with a calculator and typed the number instead of using =SUM() . This is great you can see that the co-worker left RANDBETWEEN functions in this model.

Watch Video

• F2 puts a formula in edit mode, Esc will exit edit mode
• Faster way to see all formulas: Ctrl + `
• Press again to toggle back

Video Transcript

Learn Excel form MrExcel podcast, episode 2020 — See All Formulas at One Time!

Click the “i” on the top-right hand corner, you get to the playlist for all the videos in this series, podcasting this entire book!

Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, I’m Bill Jelen. Alright, so you’ve inherited a spreadsheet from someone, you need to see how they’re building the formulas. You could always press F2 to see one formula and then Escape to go back, F2 Escape, F2 Escape, F2 Escape, that’s a huge hassle. Alright, so on your keyboard, if you’re in the US, on the left-hand side you have an Escape key underneath that accent key with a

and the ` from French accent égout, also known as a grove accent. Sometimes in Europe, these keys are different keys, it’s the grove accent key that matters, press Ctrl+` key, and it will show you all of the formulas in the spreadsheet, see, the columns get a little bit wider.

And we’re now in Show Formulas mode and- oh shoot, look at that, someone put a plug number in, it’s great, like all these formulas are some other, then that one sticks out like a sore thumb, and we still have RANDBETWEENs. Just a great way to see all of the formula cells in one single go, alright, and to get out, just Ctrl+`, again, it’s a toggle, formulas, numbers, formulas, numbers. There’s also out here on Formulas, there’s a Show Formulas button that you can use if you can’t remember the Ctrl+’.

This tip and many more in this book, click that “i” in the top-right hand corner, go out and buy the book, I sincerely would appreciate it. Alright, F2 puts it in Formula Edit mode, Escape will exit the Edit mode, lets you see formulas one of the time. But a faster way to see them all, Ctrl+`, press again to toggle back. You know, this book was crowdsource, people send in their favorite tips, Ron Armstrong, Olga K, and Sven Simon, all sending this as their favorite Excel tip, thanks to them.

And thanks to you for stopping by, we’ll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel!

Download the sample file here: Podcast2020.xlsx

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Show Formulas in Excel Instead of the Values

As soon as you type a formula in Excel and hit enter, it would return the calculated result, and the formula would disappear.

That’s how it’s supposed to work.

But what if you want to show formulas in the cells and not the calculated values.

In this Excel tutorial, I will cover the following topics:

• How to Show Formulas in Excel instead of the values.
• How to Print the formulas in Excel.
• How to Show Formulas in Excel in Selected Cells Only.
• What to Do when Excel Shows Formulas Instead of the Calculated Values.

Show Formulas in Excel Instead of the Values

Here are the steps to show formulas in Excel instead of the value:

As soon as you click on Show Formulas, it will make the formulas in the worksheet visible. It’s a toggle button, so you can click on it again to make the formulas be replaced by its calculated result.

It’s a toggle button, so you can click on it again to make the formulas be replaced by its calculated result.

As shown below, column I has the formulas. As soon as ‘Show Formulas’ button is clicked, the cells show the formulas instead of the value.

You can also use the Excel keyboard shortcut – Control + ` (you will find this key in the top-left part of the keyboard, under the Escape key).

Note: This is a sheet level technique. This means that when you use the Show Formulas option or the shortcut, it will only show the formulas in the active sheet. All the other worksheets will be unaffected. To show formulas in other worksheets, you will have to go to that sheet and use this shortcut (or ribbon button).

In some cases, you may have a lot of worksheets and you want to show the formulas in all the worksheets in the workbook.

Here are the steps that will show the formulas in all the worksheets in Excel:

As mentioned, while this may seem to have more steps as compared to a shortcut or the ‘Show Formulas’ button in the ribbon, it’s useful when you have multiple worksheets and you want to show the formulas in all these worksheets.

How to Print Formulas in Excel

Here are the steps to print formulas in Excel:

• Go to Formula tab.
• Click on the Show Formula option.
• Go to File –> Print.

The above steps would ensure that it prints the formulas and not the values.

Show Formulas in Excel Instead of the Value in Selected Cells Only

The above methods covered so far would show all the formulas in a worksheet.

However, you may want to show the formulas in some selected cells only.

For example, as an Excel trainer, I often create templates where I show the formula in one cell and its result in another cell (as shown below).

Here are the steps to show formulas in Excel in selected cells only:

This will show formulas in all the selected cell while the remaining cells would remain unchanged.

Note: Entering a space before the formula makes it a text string and the space character is visible before the equal to sign. On the other hand, using an apostrophe before the equal to sign make the formula a text string, however, the apostrophe isn’t visible in the cell (it shows up only in the formula bar and in the edit mode).

How to Handle Excel Showing Formulas Instead of Calculated Values

Sometimes, you may find that the cells in Excel are showing the formula instead of the value.

There are a couple of reasons why this may happen:

• The ‘Show Formulas’ mode is enabled or you may have accidently hit the Control + ` shortcut. To disable it, simply use the shortcut again or click on the ‘Show Formula’ option in the Formulas tab.
• It could be due to the presence of a space character or apostrophe before the equal to sign in the formula. The presence of these before the equal to sign makes the cell format as text and the formula shows up instead of the value. To handle this, simply remove these. You can use find and replace to do this.
• If a cell has ‘Text’ formatting applied to it and you enter the formula and hit enter, it will continue to show the formula instead of the calculated value. To fix this issue, go to the Home tab and with the Number group, change the formatting to General.

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Various ways to display formulas in Excel

There are a number of different ways that you can display formulas in Excel. This can be useful when investigating why a certain formula isn’t working correctly or when grading your students’ worksheets to ensure they are using formulas correctly.

Display formulas using the Show Formulas command

To show formulas in Excel, you can click on the Formulas tab and then click Show Formulas.

This will show all formulas in the Excel worksheet.

Toggle formulas on and off

You can also use a keyboard shortcut command to toggle formulas on and off. On your keyboard, typing the shortcut command Ctrl+`, will toggle on (or show) the formulas. (Note that the ` in this shortcut is the grave accent mark, usually located to the left of the 1 key on your keyboard.) Typing the shortcut command Ctrl+` again will toggle off the formulas.

Display formulas using the FORMULATEXT function

Occasionally you might want the formula to be displayed as a text string next to the formula. This can be especially useful when you want to see both the result of the formula and the formula on the same worksheet, or when introducing formulas to students. In these cases, you can use the FORMULATEXT function.

The FORMULATEXT function returns a formula as a text string, as seen in the screenshot below. In that example, if you wanted to show the formula of cell D3 in cell F3, you would input the following formula: =FORMULATEXT(D3).

There are a couple of important items to be aware of when using the FORMULATEXT. First, note that you can use it to reference a cell in another worksheet or workbook, but the workbook must be open. Otherwise, Excel will return an #N/A error value.

Excel will also return an #N/A error value if you use FORMULATEXT on a cell that doesn’t contain a formula, or if the formula can’t be displayed due to worksheet protection.

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