New Stale Value Formatting in Excel

Excel to Excel Jet Consult blog post. Microsoft recently introduced a new feature called Stale Value Formatting in Excel that applies strikethrough formatting to any values that become “stale” when tinkered in manual calculation mode. Users can manage this feature through the Calculation Options area in the Formulas tab on the Ribbon

Stale Value Formatting is an application setting that is on by default. If you prefer, you can turn it off via the Format Stale Values checkbox located under the Calculation Options menu on the Formulas tab. As at the time of writing this post, the feature is available to users running Beta Channel on Windows.

Practical Example

In the screenshot below, we have a sales report analysed showing the Quarter 1 to 4 Sales records for each of the Account Manager.

By default, the Calculation Options default is Automatic which implies that when any of the values in the referenced cells changes, the calculation will recalculate by itself without any human intervention.

However, to drive home the formatting stale value,  we are going to switch from Automatic to Manual as seen below

Next, I increased the  Quarter 1 sales values for the following Account Managers (Abiola David, Charlie Adams) and in the Calculation Option dropdown, I selected the Format Stale Values. This applied strikethrough to the cells (F4,F5, F18, and B18) that depends on the values in cells B4 and B5 respectively.

The strikethrough implies that the dependent cells requires F9 to be executed on the keyboard or switching from Manual to Automatic for the dependents cells to pick up the changes (recalculate). In the screenshot below, I pressed F9 on the keyboard and the dependent cells recalculated as expected

See you in the next blog

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