Excel corrupting formula with @

Question

I'm using EPPlus in my C# code to create an Excel workbook.  My code includes this statement:

ws.Cells[1, 1].Formula = "=UNICHAR(160)";

But when I execute my code and open the Excel workbook that it generates, cell A1 displays the error #NAME?  The Excel error message states, "The formula contains unrecognized text."

The reason for the error is that cell A1 doesn't contain the formula that I entered.  It actually contains the formula =@UNICHAR(160).  Excel has inserted an extraneous @ as the second character of the formula, thereby corrupting it.

Why is Excel converting my valid formula =UNICHAR(160) into an invalid formula =@UNICHAR(160), and how can I make it stop corrupting what I've written?

Answer 1

It appears that there's no way to prevent the insertion of @ into the =UNICHAR(160) formula.  The answer to the Stack Overflow question noted by Solar Mike indicates that implicit intersection is here to stay.

As a workaround, I was able to use the formula =CHAR(160) instead, and Excel didn't corrupt that.  For some reason, Excel appears to treat =CHAR(160) as returning a single value, but =UNICHAR(160) as returning a range of values, so it adds the @ symbol to return only the first value in the range, even though the unicode character 160 isn't really a range.

Although replacing UNICHAR() with CHAR() isn't a workable solution for rendering any unicode character, it appeared to fix my specific problem.