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Participant
July 1, 2025
Answered

Calculations not working in worksheet

  • July 1, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 593 views

Hello! Hoping someone may be able to help.
I've created this worksheet for a client which calculates a spending and retirement budget. I created all of the calculation fields in Acrobat 2025 (Mac). The "Total spending" section calculates a monthly and annual amounts. The annual amount basically multiplies the monthly by 12. Simple, right? When entering values starting at the top left, the first section performs as expected, but the remaining sections don't totally calculate the annual correctly until you tab to the next section and enter a value. Not ideal, but we can live with that. The real problem is in the "Discretionary spending" section - the annual cell doesn't calculate properly until you tab through the cells and enter a value in the first "Social Security" cell. Very much appreciate any insight into why this is happening. 

Correct answer PDF Automation Station

Change your calculation order:

https://pdfautomationstation.substack.com/p/pdf-field-calculation-order-matters

2 replies

Participant
September 10, 2025

If you are Looking for a Retirement Calculator then you should definitely try out this FIRE Calculator It's a simple Retirement Calculator tool that does the math automatically and shows results in an easy format.

 

PDF Automation Station
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 2, 2025
Kathy5CDBAuthor
Participant
July 2, 2025

Thank you for the response. 

I have double checked the calculation order and I believe it is correct. Did you open the file to see the order? If so, can you please let me know what is not correct? It would be helpful to understand in more detail what the issue is so I can fix it properly.
Thank you! 

PDF Automation Station
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 2, 2025

I did open it but I didn't go through all the fields.  Any field that uses other calculated fields in its calculation should come after the fields that are inputs into its calculation.  Otherwise, there will be a lag in calculation results since all calculations run every time a field value changes.  For example, if field D is the sum of fields A, B, and C, and A, B, and C have their own calculations, they must all come before field D, otherwise the values that feed into D might not be correct because they are calculating after D is calculated.

The default calculation order is the order in which calcualtions were added to fields, so if you add them in the logical order it should be correct.