Error building formula

Question

I am trying to build formulas involving cells in another table on the same sheet. I click on the cell I want to reference, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
When it works, the cell I click becomes coloured, and the formula includes a reference in the form "Table Name :: cell column&row". However, other times, it doesn't work, and I get a reference to some random cell in the table where the formula is, and that cell changes colour. It seems to depend on the cell being referenced. I even tried referencing a cell that worked, and then editing the reference itself to point to the cell I really wanted - it reverted to a reference to the wrong cell.
It seems that the cells that I am having trouble referencing are ones I recently added to the table, by inserting rows, since it was last saved (when everything worked).
Any ideas?
Message was edited by: Brian Gibb
Message was edited by: Brian Gibb
Message was edited by: Brian Gibb

Answer 1

I have figured out what caused this problem, and how to work around it. Based on what I found, I would say that this is a bug in Numbers - the program doesn't work the way it should.
It turns out that the cells I was referring to (in a table of input value) had as their rightmost header column a small integer (they were box numbers on tax information slips). The formulas that referred to them set up references to, for example, "2007 22" meaning the value in box 22 in year 2007 in the input values table. When later I edited the formula, rather than interpreting it as a reference to the row identified as 22 in the other table, it changed the reference to row 22 in the current table.
I got around it by changing the layout of my input values table so the box number was no longer the rightmost header column (rather the description text is). Now the references read, for example, "2007 Income tax deducted", and the confusion goes away.