Formulas in a cell don't work as formulas.

I am using Excel from Office XP, and I have a pair of formulas in a pair of cells which create a URL string in each which references Google maps and MS Maps for a given latitude and longitude. The formula in each cell of column C is:

="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&t=k&om=1&ll="&a1&","&b1&"&z=16"

and in column D:

="http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp="&a1&"~"&b1&"&style=a&lvl=15&alt=-1008&encType=1"

The problem is that instead of handling these formulas as formulas, the spreadsheet insists that are strings, and when I try to replicate the first two cells downward they are copied verbatim to the other cells; the references don't change to the equivalent cells on other rows.

When I do any editing on one of these cells the formula bar presents the contents as a formula: the references are colored and capitalized. But when I try to use one of them, say, in cell e1:

=hyperlink(c1,"Google Link")

I get an error about "cannot open the specified file" rather than a browser window.

Any clues?

Thanks for the comment, Roy. You may have noticed that I mentioned using the hyperlink function to reference the cell hopefully containing the URl string, but that string is not composed dynamically as I would expect the string to be, with the values of the latitude/longitude from each row inserted.

I started out doing exactly what you suggested, and it works just fine to open a browser window from an Excel cell click. What I want to do is export the data in the sheet to MapPoint pushpins, and have the links embedded into the pin "balloons" for clicking there. When I export the cells with the hyperlink calls in them, I just get a comment in the balloon containing the second argument of the hyperlink call, and which is a hyperlink, but not to the first argument. However, when I hand-create a URL in a cell and export that I get just what I want in the balloon. So all I need to do is to create a dynamic URL with lat/lon included in a cell and export it, but I can't get Excel to create such a URL. It seems simple; I can't believe it's a bug, but that I must be doing something wrong.