Handling Error Messages in Excel
Excel treats error messages as a serious issue. So serious in fact that if you have one DIV!0 for example, all cells linked to it change to error messages. You can tell Excel to ignore this.
As shown below in D7, sometimes there are error messages in Excel which are correct but we need to ignore them. In this case the other income is 0 so the DIV/0 is correct. But this error affects other cells lower down and we would prefer if it was changed to a 0.
IFERROR is fairly new to Excel. The syntax is simple in that you
- Tell it where to look, and then
- What must happen if it is an error (note that you can’t control what happens if it is not an error)
IFERROR Ex 1
In C8 to C and L8 to L35 we have VLOOKUPs looking for mismatches. The problem is that in C85 and L36 we need to add up the totals but because of the N/A’s we can’t add it. Correct the formulas in C8 to C84 and L8 to L35 so that if it is an error it results in a zero.
To see the full course contents click here.