I also use this trick to “turn off” automatic Text to Columns when pasting text into a spreadsheet after I have already used Text to Columns. Before learning this trick, I used to exit excel to turn off the automatic text to columns “feature”.

One way is to add another column that links to the row containing the manager:

_A_ _B_ _C_
1| 444 444 =1
2| 333 444 =1+C1
3| 222 333 =1+C2
4| 111 333 =1+C2

Assume Employee no. in column A and Manager is in Column B.

Put C1=1 and C2=”=1+C”&MATCH(B2,A:A,0) and fill down as shown in the table.

Then copy/paste special values and evaluate the resulting formulas in column C using one of the methods described above.

You can then select C1 and press Ctrl+Shift+} (Goto|Special|Dependents) to get rows of all employees refering to C1.

I have a spreadsheet that gives me the employee number (a unique identifier), the name of the employee, and the supervisor’s name. Now, its easy to find out the number of people reporting in to every supervisor. However, if I want to find out the span of control of a supervisor, how do I go about finding that? E.g. Emp #111 & #222 report to Emp #333; Emp #333, in turn, reports to Emp #444, ergo, Emp #444′s span of control is 3 (Emp #333 and the employees reporting to #333 i.e. #111 and #222). Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Even better is to select an empty cell, and use Paste Special – Add. This way you don’t have to clutter up a cell with “1?. But these paste special tips are for regular numeric cells that are formatted as text, while the topic of the post is formulas in cells that are formatted as text.

All cells in the range is being mulitiplied by ’1′ and thereby revaluated.

Isn’t it Replace “=” to “=” does not work when formulas are longer than 256 characters?

For that matter, I find it impossible to read (in the sheet) a formula in a Text-formatted cell which is longer than 255 characters. I can see it in the formula bar interestingly enough.

Do you think the average user has gotten smarter, or at least more observant, since you left the corporate world? Let’s face it, you’re going to be writing Bibles for the next 50 years.

Anyway, the correct answer for the average user is to click the little green triangle in the cell and select the convert to numbers option. I would venture to guess that answer is too obvious for anyone here because turning off error checking was second on the list of changes to make on a new Excel install (it comes right in between disabling macro security at #1 and turning off that ridiculous getpivotdata function at #3).

Edit|Replace “=” with “=” also works for evaluating them. It has the advantage of working on more than one column but you need to change the number format after. Another difference is that Edit-replace will try to complete the formula with missing brackets if possible and will prompt you at the first invalid formula in the selection whereas text-to-columns converts all formulas and ignores invalid ones. If using on external references this can be troublesome as you can get stuck in a repeated loop of prompts.

A second alternative is to format the number as general and then copy and paste the range by activating the office clipboard. Choose paste-special as text after if necessary to evaluate (which is the default method for larger ranges anyway). This method can be quicker as you don’t need to copy-paste values before. A similar comment is in “numbers stored as text”. lhm

1. Reformat the cells in the range as the number format you want. This will not convert the formula, but it does allow the next step to work.

2. Do a “Find and Replace All” on the range, changing all “=” to “=” (just because that will exist in any formula). EXCEL then changes the cell contents to be the formula instead of being text.

For an odd result, try skipping step 1. You end up with the results of the formulas, left-justified and looking like text. However, if you do an F2/Enter, it returns to the text display version of the formula. At least in EXCEL 2007. I would call that a bug, actually.