Trace dependents (Excel 2002)

Topic

New Reply

Has anyone had the experience of not being able to select dependent cells in Excel 2002? I have a user who pointed this out to me, so I set up a small simulation (put integers in A1, A2, A3, then the SUM function in A4). If I select A4 and select precedents, no problem. But if I select A1 or A2 or A3 and try to select dependents, I get the message that “The Trace Dependents command found no formulas that refer to the active cell.” Couldn’t find anything to address this. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Reply | Quote

Replies

Works fine for me (XP).

Reply | Quote

And yet it doesn’t, neither for my user nor myself.

Is there a setting somewhere that I’m missing? I am really puzzled about this.

Thanks,

Reply | Quote

could you attach a zipped workbook that shows the problem?

Reply | Quote

Unfortunately my company is blocking zipped attachments at the moment because of the current virus problem. However, I continued researching this problem and found the following: the problem began with the file my user sent me, which is a large (10.1MB) and complex model. The status bar shows the Calculate indicator even though Calculation mode is set to Automatic. A colleague was able to get the dependent cells to display in the problem file by activating each dependent cell and pressing Enter first (thereby causing a calculation at least of that cell), but that didn’t work for me. Also, the Calculate indicator stays on even when I switch to another file, even a blank new one. It stays on even if I close the problem file. I have to restart Excel for it to disappear.

Thus we think the file itself is corrupt in some manner, altho we don’t know how.

And in another burst of irony, between the time I received the file (earlier today) and now, I have been upgraded to Office 2003, and now my Trace Precedents works, even with the problem file open. I can only speculate that it wasn’t working in XP because the problem file affected all calculations, although I have not heard of that before.

Curiouser and curiouser…

Thanks for all your efforts,

Reply | Quote

The file is probably not corrupt, but simply a bit too complex. Charles Williams’s site has a lot of information about these matters.

Reply | Quote

The file is probably not corrupt, but simply a bit too complex. Charles Williams’s site has a lot of information about these matters.

Reply | Quote

Unfortunately my company is blocking zipped attachments at the moment because of the current virus problem. However, I continued researching this problem and found the following: the problem began with the file my user sent me, which is a large (10.1MB) and complex model. The status bar shows the Calculate indicator even though Calculation mode is set to Automatic. A colleague was able to get the dependent cells to display in the problem file by activating each dependent cell and pressing Enter first (thereby causing a calculation at least of that cell), but that didn’t work for me. Also, the Calculate indicator stays on even when I switch to another file, even a blank new one. It stays on even if I close the problem file. I have to restart Excel for it to disappear.

Thus we think the file itself is corrupt in some manner, altho we don’t know how.

And in another burst of irony, between the time I received the file (earlier today) and now, I have been upgraded to Office 2003, and now my Trace Precedents works, even with the problem file open. I can only speculate that it wasn’t working in XP because the problem file affected all calculations, although I have not heard of that before.

Curiouser and curiouser…

Thanks for all your efforts,

Reply | Quote

If I trace the precedents of the sum in say A4, and do not clear the trace, tracing the dependents of the source number cell is the same as tracing the precedents of the sum, and XL 2000 beeps at me (as if to say “you did that already, stupid”) but I don’t get any error message.

Reply | Quote

If I trace the precedents of the sum in say A4, and do not clear the trace, tracing the dependents of the source number cell is the same as tracing the precedents of the sum, and XL 2000 beeps at me (as if to say “you did that already, stupid”) but I don’t get any error message.

Reply | Quote

And yet it doesn’t, neither for my user nor myself.

Is there a setting somewhere that I’m missing? I am really puzzled about this.

Thanks,

Reply | Quote

Works fine for me (XP).

Reply | Quote