Struggling to concatenate...

[chromeBuddha]

I am trying to concatenate using a text string, "January " and a value from a cell on another worksheet. The worksheet name is Total and the cell is Q1. I have tried =CONCATENATE("January ", Total!Q1). I don't get any errors, but it treats it like a string instead of a formula and just displays "=CONCATENATE("January ", Total!Q1)" in the cell. I am working on a time tracking spread sheet to keep track of vacation time. Each worksheet will represent one month and I would like to have the year inherited from the Total worksheet so that next year I can change one cell and the year will be extended through all the sheets... Since the contents of Q1 are a number, I also tried converting to text before concatenating...

[chromeBuddha]

Sorry, I kept fiddling around with it and then typed it in verbatim in another cell and it worked fine...then cleared the cell and retyped...and it worked. What is it that sometimes causes a cell to not display the results of a formula correctly?

[chromeBuddha]

And the most "fun"/sad part is, when I click on the Fx button to analyze the formula, it shows it equal to "January 2015", but the cell still displays the formula rather than the string...

[abousetta]

Formulas >> Show Formulas

That would show the formula, but not the value from the formula

[chromeBuddha]

Now I can feel super unsmart...I finally realized that some of the cells were formatted as TEXT and others as General. Text displays cell contents just as entered, general will display the results of the formula... I had to change the format to General, then click on the Formula button to evaluate the formula, then the string would display correctly...

[abousetta]

We learn by our mistakes and the mistakes of others. That's just part of life. Cells formatted as text can often be a huge pain and I've lost hours trying to figure what was wrong and that ends up being the culprit.

Glad you found the problem.

abousetta

P.S. If that takes care of your original question, please select Thread Tools from the menu link above and mark this thread as SOLVED. Thanks.