To get Excel to properly display the result:
1 Select the cell.
2 Format the cell as "General".(Right-click the cell, select Format Cells, and choose "General".)
3 Delete the "=" at the beginning of your formula, and hit Enter.
4 Insert the "=" back in the formula at the beginning.
Re: Problem: Formula displayed instead of value. I have found that entering a formula into a cell that had once contained a text item will sometimes display the formula, not the result, no matter what I do. Formats, check boxes, whatever, nothing will change the display to the result.  Excel CELL, COLUMN or ROW showing formula instead of result. In this situation, the most likely cause is that the cell is formatted as text. This often happens when you have imported data from another system. You will need to change the format to General. Even then it may still show the formula. A common question we get is why is excel showing formula instead of result or value. There are a couple of possible answers depending if it is the whole sheet doing it or just some select cells, columns or rows. If the formula is an array formula, select the range that contains the array formula. How to select a range that contains the array formula. Click a cell in the array formula. On the Home tab, in the Editing group, click Find & Select, and then click Go To.  Excel displays formula rather than result. Sometimes a bug in Excel results in the application displaying the text of a formula rather than the result of the formula in the spreadsheet. I have not been able to find a pattern of when it does it, but I have some spreadsheets that do this consistently. The Fix. To get Excel to properly display the result: 1  Select the cell. 2  Format the cell as General. ( 3 Right-click the cell, select Format Cells, and choose General.). 4  Delete the = at the beginning of your formula, and hit Enter. 5  Insert the = back in the formula at the beginning The next reason why formulas are shown as formulas: You may have set the cell formatting to “Text” and then typed the formula in it. When you set the cell formatting to “Text”, Excel treats the formula as text and shows it instead of evaluating it. To fix this error, just select the cell, set its formatting to “General”. Now edit the formula and press enter. (Alternatively you can press F2 and then Enter after setting format to General).  Q: I have a recurring problem in an Excel spreadsheet, and there is probably an easy solution. First I export a QuickBooks report to an Excel file, then insert a column. If I try to use a formula in that new column, only the formula displays, not the result. But I can use formulas in a new row, below the original data.  My problem is that it seems that everytime I get a spreadsheet from someone else I can not use simple functions like Concatenate because I get the formula showing in the cells and not the results. I know that, in theory, you can display the result instead of the formula by using CTRL + `(grave accent). Formula shows in cell instead of result. fugnose asked on September 9, 2010. I need to import data into MS Access from Excel spreadsheets provided to me by others. I need to organise the spreadsheets into the correct format so that I can import them directly into Access. A single keystroke lets you toggle between Excel's normal display, which shows the results of the formulas in the spreadsheet, and a display mode that shows the actual formulas. The keystroke is ctrl-`; press it once, and Excel displays formulas instead of results. Press it again, and the results appear again.  If the entire spreadsheet is showing the underlying formula instead of the results it could be that you have the ‘Show Formula’ button toggled to on. Go to the FORMULA tab, by the FORMULA AUDITING section and click the SHOW FORMULA button, or click CTRL + ~ (next to the 1 key). A common question we get is why is excel showing formula instead of result or value. There are a couple of possible answers depending if it is the whole sheet doing it or just some select cells, columns or rows.
http://www.mrexcel.com/archive/Formatting/2921.html http://www.auditexcel.co.za/blog/excel-showing-formula-instead-of-result/ https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Replace-a-formula-with-its-result-38001951-c0e8-4fbd-9048-37ef81e2891e http://users.wfu.edu/matthews/misc/Excel/FormulaDisplayBug.html http://chandoo.org/wp/2010/04/12/excel-formulas-are-not-working/ http://appscout.pcmag.com/none/275376-excel-displays-formulas-instead-of-results http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_xp-excel/formula-shows-in-cell-instead-of-result/990fa6fa-5f94-4b03-9777-8390fb74d8a3 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2386995,00.asp http://www.auditexcel.co.za/blog/excel-showing-formula-instead-of-result/
what to do when excel shows formula instead of the result