How to show formulas and explain values automatically in Excel?

Cell A1 is “$100,000,000”

Cell A2 is “$50,000,000”

Cell B1 reads “Current Ratio”

Cell B2 defines Current Ratio as “Current Assets Divided By Current Liabilities”

Cell B3 is A1/A2, and displays “2.0”

How do I make it so that cell C1 DISPLAYS"= A1/A2" or some variant of that?

And then how do i make it so that cell C2 DISPLAYS"$100,000,000/$50,000,000 = 2"?

Ctrl ~

=A1 & “/” & A2 would be 100,000,000/50,000,000

And if you want to include the answer:

=A1 & “/” & A2 & " = " & B3 would be $100,000,000/$50,000,000 = 2"

Format any cell as “Text” type. Then, type whatever you want and Excel will not try to make a formula.

instead of =a1/a2 for the formula, type '=a1/a2. The little ’ will turn it to text son.

It may have been an incorrect assumption of mine, but I figured he wanted to make a lot of these text displays for hundreds of calculations (thus looking to automate it via formula). But perhaps I over thought it ha ha

I tried this and it gave me an error message. Does it matter that I’m using Excel 2007?

What do the & and / symbols do?

Haha yes, I 'm looking for a way to display something automatically. I want subsequent boxes to _ automatically _ formulas from OTHER cells (if that’s possible)

Hmm. In that case, let’s use VBA and call this function “getFormula”. Writing on iPad, so might have syntax errors.

function getFormula(y as int, x as int)

getFormula = cells(x, y).formula

end function

invoke this function as such: =getFormula(row(B3), column(B3))

You might want to control for ActiveSheet also. So, somehow feed in the worksheet name for the cell B3 that you are referencing. As mentioned, I’m writing this without a computer, so might have incorrect names here and there. The general approach will work though.

use an apostrophe before your text.

it’ll display the cell as text.

this doesn’t solve the second question.

although i wonder why you would want to spell the formula out and also show the numbers as well…

Anything in “” would be text. So “/” inserts the line inbetween the cell references. & joins cell references. For example, I make a lot of autopopulating data visualizations. So if A1 is Coke and A2 is Income (but both of these change depending on the data pulled), I could make Cell A3 = A1 & " 's " & A2 & " Trends over time period". That would then show Coke’s Income Trends over Time Period. I then reference Cell A3 in the graph’s title.

I copy/pasted those formulas I wrote for you into a worksheet and it worked correctly (I’m using 2010 but this should work in 2007). If you don’t want to go the VBA route, reply with the formula that gave you an error. I’ll let you know what is wrong with it

VBA? I don’t have any experience with VBA. Was I supposed " enable VBA" or something?

No I meant, if you don’t want to do the VBA Solution that was suggested above (which is cleaner). The formulas I suggested don’t require VBA