In Excel, select the formulas you want to change, open the Formulas tab, choose the matching command, and confirm.
Select the formulas you want to change.
Open the Formulas tab on the Excel ribbon and pick the command that acts on formulas.
Set any options the dialog offers, then confirm.
Check the result on a few formulas before applying it to the whole sheet.
Need it as an auditable file?
Ships inside the linked template — formula-driven, unlocked, audit-ready.
What this does
Strip “not function excel” back and what you are really doing in Excel is a calculation you can defend to a CFO or an auditor. The specific commands matter far less than one habit: keep the values behind the result in their own labelled cells, reference those cells from every formula, and rely on Excel to recalculate the instant anything moves. Handle formulas that way and the work scales from a handful of rows to thousands without breaking, and it stays auditable for the next person to open it — including you in six months. That is the whole gap between a quick fix you redo every single time and a pattern you build once with formulas and simply reuse. It is worth separating “not function excel” from the many near-identical phrasings that surround it. Specifically, “not function excel” turns on not function, and that not function detail is what sets it apart from the dozen near-identical formula questions around it. In Excel the safe pattern for not function is the same every time: isolate the inputs, apply the “not function excel” step to a small copy, check the figure for not function against the tool on this page, then scale up once it looks right. Doing “not function excel” in that order means a surprise in your not function data surfaces while it is cheap to fix, not after the result has gone into a report. Keep the not function inputs labelled, point the formula at them, and the “not function excel” outcome stays something you can re-run and defend long after you first searched for it. Most people learn this as a sequence of clicks and forget it by next week; learning it as a pattern instead is what lets you apply it to the next, slightly different version of the problem without starting from scratch. That is the difference this page is trying to make.
A worked example
Walk it through on a sample of your formulas first. Highlight the formulas you want to act on, open the Formulas tab in Excel, pick the matching command, and confirm. Rehearse it on a throwaway copy — or on the tool above — so nothing surprises you on the live sheet. When it behaves the way you expect on a handful of formulas, the very same clicks cover the entire table. It is worth doing your formulas properly the first time. It is the kind of number that ends up in a budget, a board pack or a loan application, so getting it traceable and correctly formatted matters as much as the maths itself. Build it once, verify it against the tool above, and the same setup keeps earning its keep on every later visit to the file. Search results often blur “not function excel” together with looser questions about formulas, but the wording here is precise on purpose. Specifically, “not function excel” turns on not function, and that not function detail is what sets it apart from the dozen near-identical formula questions around it. The quickest reliable route in Excel is to build a tiny example matching your data, confirm “not function excel” against the tool above, and only then run it for real — that way you solve the exact not function problem you searched for, not an approximation. The thing people get wrong about “not function excel” is treating not function as interchangeable with the generic formula case; it usually is not, and the few seconds you spend checking not function on a small sample is what keeps the result honest. If your real sheet differs in one detail, change that one input, re-check “not function excel”, and the same not function method carries straight over. If there is any chance you will reuse this, drop it into a small template tab right now: a labelled input area on the left and the formula beside it, checked once against the tool above. Next time the same question comes up, the answer is a single paste away instead of a rebuild from memory.
In Google Sheets
Everything above works in Google Sheets too. Excel and Sheets share the formula syntax used here; only the surrounding menus are arranged differently. That portability is deliberate — learn it once and it follows you between the two tools and across Windows and Mac. Nothing on this page is behind a login: the tool runs entirely in your browser, the formula is shown in full with one-click copy, and the steps work the same on Windows and Mac. That is the whole promise here — the exact answer, a way to prove it on your own numbers, and just enough context to make it stick. If you take one thing from this page on “not function excel”, make it the habit rather than the keystrokes: set the problem up with labelled inputs, reference those cells, and let Excel do the recomputing. Bookmark the page for the syntax, but do the example once in a blank sheet and check it against the tool above — five minutes of hands-on practice fixes the method in memory far better than re-reading, and it surfaces the small snags while they are still harmless. After that the technique is genuinely yours: faster than searching for it again, and reliable enough to drop into work that other people depend on.
Common mistakes
- Acting on formulas that quietly include a header or total row, so the result is off by one with no error to warn you.
- Hard-coding values inside a formula instead of referencing cells, which silently breaks the moment the data changes.
- Reporting a raw decimal (0.07) instead of formatting it as 7%, which misreads the figure by a factor of a hundred.
- Pasting values over your formulas and losing the live link, turning a working model back into a static table.
- Trusting the on-screen result without scrolling to the end of your formulas to confirm the pattern held all the way down.
Frequently asked questions
What is the quickest way to not function excel?
Use the boxed answer at the top of this page — it gives the exact Excel steps for “not function excel”, and the tool just below lets you run it on your own formulas before you touch the real sheet.
Does this work in older versions of Excel?
Yes. The approach for formulas has been stable across recent Excel versions; only the ribbon icons changed cosmetically, so the steps still apply.
How do I apply this to a whole column of formulas at once?
Set it up on the first row, then double-click or drag the fill handle — Excel repeats the same logic down every one of your formulas without re-typing it.