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cannot use pasted fractions in calculations

  1. #1
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    cannot use pasted fractions in calculations

    Hi, I do not know if this is possible but I would be grateful if someone could give me an answer please.
    I have pasted some fractions but I cannot do calculations with them or change them to decimals so I have to change them to the decimal equivalent manually. Here is a sample,
    A1 3¾
    then if I put in B1 =A1*3 the cell displays VALUE.

    Thank you.

  2. #2
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    Re: cannot use pasted fractions in calculations

    make sure they are actually set to the fraction format on the home tab... that's all I can think of. it works for me

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    Re: cannot use pasted fractions in calculations

    Thanks Scott for your reply, the cells are set to fractions and they appear in the sheet as fractions, but I cannot use them in calculations.

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    Re: cannot use pasted fractions in calculations

    1st guess is that you have a text string consisting of a 3 with the ¾ (char(190)) character. Excel does not recognize this as a number. Put the formula =ISTEXT(A1) (where A1 is a reference to the cell containing the pasted value) and see if it returns true or false. If it returns true, that will confirm that the value is a text string and Excel is not sure what to do with it.

    When hand entering mixed numbers, you want to enter them like 3 3/4 (#[space]#/#).
    If you are pasting data containing those fractional characters, you might try a simple find/replace:
    Find: alt+0190 (for ¾)
    Replace with: 3/4 ([space]3/4) or .75

    Find: alt+0189 (for ½)
    Replace with: 1/2 or .5

    and so on. If Excel fails to automatically recognize these numbers as numbers, you may need to perform an additional step to convert them to numbers.

    Make sure the destination cells are formatted as fractions (or use the decimal equivalents). If you try to put "1/2" into an unformatted cell, Excel will tend to assume you mean a date (January 2), and store the value as a data serial, which can get irritating when you want fractions -- not dates.
    Quote Originally Posted by shg
    Mathematics is the native language of the natural world. Just trying to become literate.

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    Re: cannot use pasted fractions in calculations

    Thank you MrShorty, I did what you advised and it did return as TRUE, so it looks like I will have to input the values manually.
    Thanks again to you both for your advise.

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    Re: cannot use pasted fractions in calculations

    MrShorty gave you a way of replacing the fraction portion so you don't have to do it manually, just make sure your end result is in the (#[space]#/#) format as indicated in his post

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    Re: cannot use pasted fractions in calculations

    I couldn't get this to work for me. Alt+0190
    So I googled it and found this useful document:

    http://usefulshortcuts.com/downloads/ALT-Codes.pdf

    The main thing is that Num Lock has to be on and you enter the code using the number keypad.

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