Calc: SUM, where each number is the result of a SUM

I downloaded a spreadsheet from Google Docs recently because my bad internet connection makes cloud computing impractical. I have a bunch of rows that I want to total the results of. e.g.

A1 is =SUM(1,2,3,4), B1 is =SUM(5,6,7,8) etc., and then I want to sum the results of these rows, e.g. in cell D1 =SUM(A1, A2)

What is happening is that the final cell, C1, is ignoring any value that is the result of a formula. I can’t find any options that might affect this. If a cell has a value that is only a number and not the result of a formula, it is included in the final total. Only the results of formulas are being ignored.

A1, B1 etc. have to be SUM because I add to them progressively and randomly throughout the month (basically, this is a sheet to track income and spending through the month). All cells that should have numbers in them are formatted as ‘number’ type.

I tried using the ‘formulas to values’ option in Data>Calculate, but that just put a ' in front of all the numbers that I had to manually remove, and doesn’t solve the problem of me needing to continually update the calculations.

Sigh… I’d expect someone asking questions at least trying to pay attention to what they write. “A1 is … B1 is … D1 is =SUM(A1, A2)… in the final cell, C1…”

Google Docs is notorious for their bad generation of downloadable documents. They often internally mark the cells with numbers/formulas as having textual data; that prevents Calc from taking those cells into account.

Try hard recalculation (Ctrl+Shift+F9), to recalculate the whole sheet.