excel, problem with autosum

Question

my excell workbook contains expenditure details which are categorised with total amounts recorded in a single row; when trying to total these amounts the answer is always £0.00.

Answer 1

Hi! This usually happens because the amounts are not being stored as real numbers, even though they look like currency values. In Excel, SUM/AutoSum ignores text values, so if those cells were imported, pasted from another source, or include hidden spaces/apostrophes, the result can stay at £0.00. A quick check is to click one of the amount cells: if it is left-aligned, shows a warning icon, or changing the format to Number does not help, Excel is likely treating it as text.