Page 42 - Excel Timesaving Techniques for Dummies

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5 Tailoring Excel’s
Error Checking

Technique to Your Needs

nyone with any experience building Excel worksheets knows
Save Time By that formula errors, the bane of all spreadsheets, are inevitable.
AWhenever Excel cannot successfully calculate one of your formu-
Modifying the Error
Checking settings las according to its internal rules, the program returns an error value to
its cell, indicated by the error name in all caps punctuated by a number
Hiding error indicators sign at the beginning (#) and an exclamation point (!) or question mark
in cells (?) at the end, as in #VALUE!, #NAME?, and #DIV/0!, to name but a few.
Hiding error values
in cells Not only are these error values ugly as sin, but they also tend to propa-
gate themselves all over the worksheet, spreading to all formulas that
refer to the cells that contain them. (See Techniques 31 and 32 for tips
on how to stop error values from spreading all over the place and elimi-
nate them from the worksheet.)

In an attempt to help you identify what in the blazes has caused your
formula to go haywire and return an error value rather than the result
you wanted, Excel now adds error indicators to cells. These indicators
appear as tiny green triangles in the upper-left corner of the cells con-
taining the error values, as shown in Figure 5-1. When you position the
mouse pointer over an error indicator, a Smart Tab icon (the exclama-
tion point in a diamond) appears with a ToolTip containing an explana-
tion of the problem.

• Figure 5-1: Errors, errors everywhere and indicators telling you what’s wrong
to boot!