Remember the time when you wrote an Excel formula which you are very familiar with and probably used it over a thousand times but suddenly the formula seems to stop working as expected?
You go berserk retyping and retrying the formula again and again while your boss is standing there waiting for you to give her a quick answer.
Your heartbeat is racing and your fingers start sweating, not knowing what's going on!?! Well, the rescue is probably just one button away... the F9 key!
So what's going on?
If you are using a company provided computer which is using Excel add-in, you are likely to have faced this situation. The reason is add-ins sometimes turn Automatic Calculation off to speed things up, put it simply. These add-ins should have turn Automatic Calculation back 'on' after finishing its task. But sometimes an error could cause it to "skipped" the final step without notifying the user.
To be fair, this is not bad programming by people who created add-ins to help you perform your job. Errors do happen and it is very difficult, almost impossible, to debug everything.
Besides it has to do with the very not-so-obvious place where Microsoft places the Calculation Options.
In Excel 2003 and before, it is even worst!
How F9 can help here is that it is the shortcut key for "Calculate Now", a little button sitting right beside the Calculation Options.
It forces Excel to perform calculations on all formulas across the workbook immediately when Calculation Options is set to manual.
Next time when you find your highly familiar formula behaving wildly, try the F9 button first before chasing down the sneaky one. If it doesn't tame it, then you are most likely at fault with your formula. If it does, then make sure to go to Calculation Options and set it to Automatic.
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