Google Sheets is very useful for making all sorts of different calculations with data.
There are a ton of different formulas that you can use in your spreadsheet depending on what you are trying to accomplish.
Sometimes when working in Google Sheets, you may want to show the formulas instead of just returning the result of the formula.
There are a few different ways to do this.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to show formulas in Google Sheets.
Table of Contents
Show All Formulas Used in the Sheet
Showing all the formulas used in a spreadsheet is actually really easy because there is a built-in option for this in Google Sheets.
I will show you how to do this with this example data:
In this example, I have various formulas in column C. I will set Google Sheets to show all formulas.
Here are the steps:
1. In the top menu select View
2. Next, select Show formulas
3. You will now see that all the formulas are no longer showing the calculated value, but are showing the actual formula itself
Show a Specific Formula
Sometimes instead of showing all of the formulas in an entire sheet, you may just want to show one formula in a specific cell.
That is also a relatively simple process.
To show a single formula, all you need to do is place an apostrophe (‘) at the very beginning of the cell that has the formula in it right before the equals sign:
After you place the apostrophe and hit Enter, the apostrophe will disappear and only the formula will display:
Closing Thoughts
As you can hopefully see by now, showing the formulas in your spreadsheet is a relatively easy task.
You can either use the Show all formulas option, or use an apostrophe to show the formula of a specific cell only.
As you continue to use spreadsheets learning this skill may come in handy when you need to display the formulas in your sheets.
More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Do Math Formulas
How to Convert Formulas to Values