excel error???

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mark Kennedy
  • Start date Start date
M

Mark Kennedy

I have a wierd problem at work. I think that one of my co-workers
excel needs to be reinstalled, So I'm posting it here to see if I'm
right before we reinstall everything on her pc.


Here goes.

We hve a series of spreadsheets that we use to load data into an aes
database. One of the sheets uses a three column index that must be
unique, followed by about 10 data columns. Not all of the data was
loading. We suspected duplicate indexes.

To quickly find the duplicates, the spreadsheet was sorted on the
three index columns so that any dupliates would be sequential. Two
coolumns werea dded , the first being a combination of the three index
fields into one cell <=index1&ndex2&index3).. This was in say column
H3. Cell I3 was =if(h3=h2,h3,"") If there was a duplicate, the
index would show in the cell. If it was not a duplicate, the cell
would be blank.

This works on my machine. When the same spreadsheet is loaded on my
co-workers machine, Column H would show the calculated value while
column I shows the if formula.

I've never seen something like this hapen before...and it only happens
on her mahine. Does she need to have everything reloaded? or is this
just a setting in office 2003 that needs to be set?
 
It's the same workbook?

Maybe the second pc has:
tools|Options|view tab|Formulas (checked)

But I think that this should have been set when you opened that workbook.

The shortcut key for this setting is:
ctrl-` (control-backquote--the key to the left of the 1/! on my USA keyboard)

Any chance that the user hit that by mistake?

And if the second user typed in the formula, verify that the cells were
formatted as General (not Text) and they didn't start with a space character.

If they were formatted as text, reformat as general.
then reenter the top formula (F2 and enter is enough) and drag down

=====
And I'd use something like:

=index1&"--"&index2&"--"&index3

Just in case you have an index1=12, index2=34 and index3=56 and another record
with index1=1234, index2=5 and index3=6.

You may want to read some more techniques for dealing with duplicates:
Chip Pearson's site:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/duplicat.htm
 
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