Find the numbers typed over your formulas

Finds two things Excel does not: numbers typed over formulas, and constants buried inside formulas.

New here? The step-by-step guide runs the whole thing on a worked example, with a picture of the pane at every stage.

Getting the add-in

Hardcoded Value Detector is on its way to Microsoft Marketplace, and the listing is still in Microsoft's review. Once it is live you will install it from inside Excel: Home › Add-ins, search for Hardcoded Value Detector, and press Add. Until then, email support@appgarden.co.uk and we will tell you the day it goes live.

Support

Email support@appgarden.co.uk. Include the Excel platform you are on (Windows, Mac or the web) and what the pane showed. If a scan reported something you believe is wrong, the workbook itself is the most useful thing you can send — but only send one you are content to share, and see the privacy notice first.

Replies are best-effort, usually within a few working days. There is no phone line.

Using it

Open the workbook you want to check, then Home › Hardcoded values › Check sheet. The pane lists what it found on the active sheet, and explains each one.

• A value pasted over a formula. A column of formulas with a number sitting in the middle of it — or, more often, at the top or the bottom, which is exactly where Excel's own inconsistent-formula warning cannot see it, because it works by comparing a cell against its neighbours.
• A constant inside a formula. =B2*1.2 rather than =B2*$F$1. The number is real and the answer looks right until the rate changes.

There is no score. The pane reports two checks and what they found, and a sheet with findings never reads as clean.

Free and paid

Checking the active sheet and reading the explanations are free, and stay free. The whole-workbook scan, the guided fix and the CSV or Markdown export are paid.

Undo is free in every tier, always. It is not a paid feature, it does not lapse with a licence, and it keeps working after one is cancelled. An add-in that can write to your workbook but charges to reverse it would be indefensible.

A Pro licence covers three installs — a desktop, a laptop and a machine that gets rebuilt. Team licences are a seat count, not a different feature set: team unlocks exactly what Pro unlocks. Prices and checkout.

Paddle is the merchant of record and takes the payment. The terms of service, the refund policy — a full refund within 30 days of any payment — and the privacy notice set out the rest.

Your licence key

Keys are shown on screen at the end of checkout and emailed to the address you paid with. Keep the page, or paste the key straight into the pane under Enter a licence key. Lost it? Check that email, or email support with the address you paid on.

Entering the key stores an entitlement on that machine. If Office clears its storage — which it does on the web, and Safari does on its own — re-entering the same key does not cost you a seat.

Known limits

• Hidden sheets are skipped. A hidden tab is nearly always a lookup or a scratch calculation, and a finding against a sheet you cannot see is one you cannot act on.
• With more than one workbook open, Excel can refuse the fix outright and say the workbook has lost focus. Click the workbook you are checking and try again. Nothing is written when that happens.
• On Excel on the web the export may not reach your downloads: the task pane is a sandboxed frame and the host can drop the save silently, with no error to catch. The pane says so and offers the report to copy out instead of claiming a file that may not exist.
• A run of formulas carrying two different shapes is treated as deliberate variation and gets no finding at all. Suppressing a real problem is better than offering to overwrite a number somebody meant to type.
• A sheet of more than 4,900,000 used cells is not checked, because Excel will not hand the add-in that much in one go. The pane names the sheet and says so, and every other sheet is still checked. A used range stretched by one stray cell far from the data counts at its full size, so clearing that cell usually brings the sheet back in.
• The pane lists the 200 most serious findings and says how many more there are. The CSV export has every one.
• A whole number that is a count, position or mode rather than a value is not reported: the digits in ROUND(x,2), the column in VLOOKUP(…,3,FALSE), the 9 in SUBTOTAL(9,…), a ^2. A year in DATE(2026,…) still is, because a typed year is exactly what goes stale.
• Excel on Mac and on iPad are untested. The manifest permits them, so Microsoft lists them, but no verification run has happened on either. Please report anything odd.

Your data

Nothing in your workbook leaves your machine. The add-in talks to one server, and only about your licence key. Details in the privacy notice.