I have assured the bloke on the next desk to me that STW can answer anything.

Spread sheets on his computer have started displaying a symbol which is a question mark inside a square box in text boxes that refer to spread sheet cells. My initial though was a zoom level issue, but it’s not that. Not an automatic/manual calculation issue either.

All spread sheet on his laptop show the same problem, same files on my computer work fine.

Any ideas you IT geniuses?

Resize the boxes 🙂

you both using the same version of excel,

dont think its this but worth asking.
does the sheet link to other worksheets in different drives and you have differing drive names

mr excel is sometimes usefull, not so sure today

https://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/321197-excel-character-question-mark-box.html

Resize the boxes

Boxes don’t change size between his and my computer, it’s not that though.

Yes, same verisons of Excel and all the data is local on the same sheet of the same file.

edit – (following your edit!) I’m ashamed to say I tried Google before here, and that Mr Excel page came up for me too. Yeah, you’re right, it’s not quite the same.

our IT department are running the repair tool, I think they are grasping at straws and I’d like to solve it before they can!

Have you got the same add-ins selected?

I’m unclear about ‘text boxes’ I think you mean actual text boxes, rather than cells with text in them?

Screenshot?

I’m unclear about ‘text boxes’ I think you mean actual text boxes, rather than cells with text in them?

Correct.

I’ll check the add-ins once IT have failed. 😀
We have one in particular, (Pi) that has caused problems with Office 365, but I’m not sure he has that.

I’ll try a screenshot later, but I think external image hoisting sites will be verboten.

Have you checked for any rogue Add-ins?
RM.

Fixed it. 😀

Changing the font from Calibri to Arial cured it. Still bloody peculiar though because all the text in the normal cells is Calibri, and at the same point size??!!

That is odd. Badly / non- installed font?

Not sure how a font can be badly installed, why would it work within cells, but not graphical (in this case text box) objects?

Spread sheets on his computer have started displaying a symbol which is a question mark inside a square box in text boxes that refer to spread sheet cells.

I think it just means it can’t display that character as it’s not defined in that font.

Character encoding issue at a guess, those weird ? in a box characters are used when the font you are using doesn’t support some weird character or other, either because it is some obscure foreign/accented/emoji character or because someone has accidentally used a character that looks like a normal character but isn’t (smart quotes instead of normal quote marks being the classic one)

Standard letters and numbers, which are referred from cells formatted in the same font and size. Like I say, very peculiar, but working now even though I don’t understand the cause.

Thanks all.