Are your formulas not updating?

Usually, formulas update themselves. If they don’t, I’m guessing you’re pretty baffled at the moment.

You will notice a formula not updating when you:

1. Change the value of a cell and expect a formula in another cell to return something different
2. Copy a formula to other cells and expect the result to change

Luckily, this is easy to fix because the cause is simple.

The formulas don’t update because your calculation settings are set to ‘Manual’.

That means you must manually tell Excel to recalculate all formulas when something changes.

This is not the desired setting unless your spreadsheet is so big it can barely run.

Whether or not you switched on manual calculation by accident remains a mystery… 🙂

Let’s just change it to automatic.

Go to the Data tab -> Formulas -> Calculation Options -> Automatic.

Now, your formulas calculate automatically.

If this doesn’t calculate your current formulas, restart Excel.