Excel woes

[Pergamum]

I only have a small knowledge of how to use Excel and I don't want to learn much.

But I have to use an Excel sheet to file monthly reports of income and expenses.

I switched laptops and am using an Excel program adapted to the country I am living in. The problem is that this country uses periods where commas should be. So 1,000 become 1.000, - really counter-productive for calculating expenses. Now this Excel program is automatically converting thousands into 1.300 instead of 1,300. And the formulas are wonky.

How do I simply turn off all formulas? I want to prevent the stupid program from changing what I type in?

 

[Jake]

A few suggestions: (I'm on Excel 2016 on Mac, so these will differ a bit depending on what you're using, but the concepts are the same).

If you really just want to turn off all formatting, select all cells you want to disable it for. Then go to the formatting menu and select Text. More specifically: I select Format on the top menu (File, Edit, ..., Format) > Format Cells > Number tab (first tab to come up) > then select Text on the left. It should explain that then, the text will be displayed exactly as entered.

Now the actual problem is that your region settings in Excel are corresponding to a different country than what you want. However, Excel only gets these from the system. You should be able to change your region settings in your system settings. For example, on Mac, I go to System Preferences > Language and Region. On the general tab, I can choose the settings for number (, for grouping and . for decimal). There are similar settings on other OS. On Windows 7: Control Panel > Clock, Language, and Region > Change the date, time or number format and then make sure you are set to U.S.

However, a simpler solution might just be to use an online spreadsheet program. Google Sheets should do all you need, should use US settings, and can export to an Excel file. If you prefer an Excel interface, within the free version of Microsoft OneDrive you can also edit a basic spreadsheet that saves natively in Excel format.

 

[Pergamum]

Thanks so much. I was able to turn off the automatic calculations and just type what I wanted and manually add it up.