Using the Formula & Display Bar in Microsoft Excel

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Gary for Expert Village, now let’s take a look at the formula bar on the spreadsheet. We see here, when I clicked on the first cell when I started putting in my information and my formula bar, which is right up here, which is where we could enter in all the information for each cell, we see here that there is text written. The cell is able to identify what we are putting in, what kind of information we’re putting in, so here it identifies this as text and it puts in the text string into our formula, into the formula bar on top. Now one of the things, if we go ahead over here and let’s say for B2, I’m not going to enter the information here on the spreadsheet but rather what I’m going to do is I’m going to go up to my formula bar and I’m going to put in the information and you’ll see that is what’s going to appear on the, in the spreadsheet in that cell. I just want to show you that when you start putting in information of a number that it is too long to fit into the cell it will either convert it to the scientific notation of that number and the scientific notation it can’t show the, the actual digits or the other way that Excel will display the information is with the hash marks and that basically just means that you don’t have enough room to display the information. So if you see the, if there’s not enough room there, you can just widen up, again just by dragging, again by putting the cursor in between the two columns and dragging it over a little bit. We see that the information in this case it was dates, we see that the dates do appear, but when there is not enough room to display them we see the hash marks. And if for some reason Excel can not calculate, the make a calculation and the number or the result that we are looking for is not able to be shown, it will show the word “value” and then it will show these hash marks and the word “value” meaning that the result can not be shown because it is a bad formula or a bad calculation, something is wrong in the formula, or one of the numbers that is trying to be used in the formula. So those are different errors that we might find in Excel and what they might mean. "