No, I'm not the original poster.

The "Show formulas in cells instead of their calculated results" was not clicked. I did work around the problem, by moving the = to another cell and that cell showed the calculated result. I tried everything, making sure the cells were formatted the same. I think it might have something to do with the cells I'm accessing are merged cells and Excel might be confused, or it just me and I don't know what I'm doing! Thank you so much for trying to help.