Error message for comparison formulas

[Guest]

Hi all,
One machine has been generating strange error messages for formulas which
are perfectly legitimate (i.e. work correctly on other machines).

It seems to be anything involving =, >, or < such as the following:

=if(5>3, "yes, "no")
=if(A2="val", "yes", "no")
=vlookup("target", A1:B10,2)


All of those formulas result in "the formula you typed contains an error",
as do sumif, countif, and any formula where a comparison is made. It seems
the error only happens if there is more than one parameter. When I click OK,
the highlighted portion is immediately after the comparison operator (=, <,

).

However, the following formulas work (which also perform comparisons):
=5>3 (cell displays TRUE)
=A2="boo" (displays TRUE if A2 is boo)

I am an experienced user and I have never seen this error before and it
happens on just one machine. I originally had Office 2003 and upgraded to
2007 to see if it got rid of the problem, but it doesn't, nor did
uninstalling Office and then installing it from scratch. I'd appreciate any
suggestions not requiring a reformat.

Thanks!

 

[Dave Peterson]

Maybe it's the list separator.

Many Europeans use a semicolon as that separator, so their formulas would look
like:

=if(5>3;"yes";"no")

In winXP, you can look in the control panel, regional and language
options|Regional options tab.

then click customize and look for List separator on the Numbers tab.