Stale Value Formatting in Excel – What Is It and Why Does It Matter

If you’ve just started using Microsoft Excel, you might get used to the program automatically applying any changes and recalculating cell results for all formulas inside a datasheet. However, once the dataset grows larger, automatic calculations can take a significant amount of time and CPU resources to complete. This can lead to the program stuttering or even freezing until it recalculates all cells. Additionally, when you add a new cell or modify anything, the process starts again. Manual calculations allow you to set off a range of cells to be recalculated only when you want to.

In normal cases, this presents a bit of a dilemma. If you leave the range on “Manual” for too long without forcing a recalculation, you might get values that have been calculated a while ago without knowing it. Stale Value Formatting in Excel aims to rectify that.

What Is Stale Value Formatting?

Simply put, stale value formatting showcases the cells that might’ve been affected by recent changes somewhere else in the dataset.

Consider a basic example. You have a sales dataset for a few salespeople and all their sales throughout the month. You use the sales totals to calculate each salesperson’s commission. To avoid continuously recalculating totals, you run the commission calculation at the end of each payment period. However, with the commission based on the total sales, values getting changed anywhere (such as a refund that changes the quantity of some items) would spill over into that value.

Without stale value formatting, you’d have no way to detect whether your previously calculated values are still true. The only way to make sure your dataset is up-to-date is to enforce another recalculation.

Stale Value Formatting for Microsoft 365

Typically, Excel doesn’t provide any options for stale value formatting in Excel. However, in 2023, Microsoft started rolling out a beta feature for Microsoft Insiders who used the Beta Channel on Windows. In November 2024, the feature started getting released to all users who work in Excel for Microsoft 365.

The basics of the new stale value formatting in Excel are simple: stale values are immediately detected, shown, and struck-through. Then, you can select a cell with a stale value and force a recalculation by pressing “F9.”

After that, the entire dataset will get refreshed and all strike-through values removed, at least until you start making further changes that create more stale values.

The stale value formatting feature started with Excel 365 for Windows, Version 2409 (Build 18025.20126 or later). However, it might not become available for all users immediately.

Additionally, the option is still limited to that single version of Excel, and there’s no way to change what formatting Excel will use for stale values. Striking through is the only option you get, at least for now.

Stale Value Formatting in Excel Manually

If you’re using another version of Windows, or want formatting different from striking through, you can implement a basic timestamp system for tracking cells that have been changed recently.

Step 1: Add a Timestamp column next to the values that are frequently recalculated or changed. The column needs to be in the Date format. Let’s say that our values are in column B. We’ll use a helper column C for timestamps.

Step 3: Whenever you enter or edit a value somewhere in column B, move to the same row in column C and press “Ctrl Shift ;” then “Ctrl ;”This adds a timestamp with the time and date of the edit.

Step 4: Implement conditional formatting for the Timestamp column (Conditional Formatting > New Rule).

Step 5: For example, you can highlight all cells that have a value older than seven days with =TODAY() - $B1 > 7. Applying the formula in Conditional Formatting should change the cell reference to count rows appropriately.

After that, you can usually see which cells have been changed a while ago and might contain stale values.

You can also play around with different timestamp requirements (such as stale values being ones that are more recent rather than older ones).

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