Part II: Working with Formulas and Functions
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- Press Esc to leave Edit mode.
- Select cell A2.
- Choose Home ➪ Clipboard ➪ Paste (or press Ctrl+V) to paste the text into cell A2.
You also can use this technique to copy just part of a formula, if you want to use that part in
another formula. Just select the part of the formula that you want to copy by dragging the mouse,
and then use any of the available techniques to copy the selection to the Clipboard. You can then
paste the text to another cell.Formulas (or parts of formulas) copied in this manner won’t have their cell references adjusted
when they are pasted to a new cell. That’s because the formulas are being copied as text, not as
actual formulas.Tip
You can also convert a formula to text by adding an apostrophe (‘) in front of the equal sign. Then, copy the
formula as usual and paste it to its new location. Remove the apostrophe from the pasted formula, and it will
be identical to the original formula. And don’t forget to remove the apostrophe from the original formula
as well. n
Converting formulas to values .................................................................................
If you have a range of formulas that will always produce the same result (that is, dead formulas),
you may want to convert them to values. If, say, range A1:A20 contains formulas that have calcu-
lated results that will never change — or that you don’t want to change. For example, if you use
the RANDBETWEEN function to create a set of random numbers and you don’t want Excel to recal-
culate those random numbers each time you press Enter, you can convert the formulas to values.
Just follow these steps:- Select A1:A20.
- Choose Home ➪ Clipboard ➪ Copy (or press Ctrl+C).
- Choose Home ➪ Clipboard ➪ Paste Values (V).
- Press Esc to cancel Copy mode.