Why is Mathematica treating my text as input?

Question

I have typed in some text input by using Alt-7 to convert everything into text, but why is text still evaluated? Or is there better way to make comments other than (* text here *), because in my text there are numbers and it is also evaluating them too?

Answer 1

I suspect the reason for your problem is that the cell you are typing in is not a Text cell, but an Input cell. That means it has the Evaluatable property and will be evaluated. It also means that Alt-7 won't make the text into a comment. The only way I know to put a comment in an Input cell is with (* *).

You can check this by looking at the Format > Style menu. If the Input menu-item is has a check mark, then what you trying to do with Alt-7 won't work. If that's so, you have the option of changing the cell type to Text.

Answer 2

I suspect that you did select the cell content and used Alt-7. Then the cell is still an input cell but the content is formatted as text which you can check by using the menu entry Cell -> Show Expression. That will show something like this:

Cell[BoxData[
 StyleBox[
  RowBox[{"1", "+", "1"}], "Text"]], "Input"] 

You should, as others have mentioned select the cell (by clicking on the cell bracket on the right) and then use Alt-7 to convert the cell to a text cell, which then won't be evaluatable with shift-return.