Re: [libreoffice-users] Preventing the display of #VALUE! in a spreadsheet

At 19:31 21/06/2015 +0100, Pete Nikolic wrote:
> I am running Libre office Version 4.3.7.2 on Arch Linux. I have a 
> lot of cells with this or similar in
> =IF(D10-K10>0,D10-K10,"")
> the problem is that if either D10 or K10 is blank the result is 
> displayed as #VALUE! that means several hundred times not only is it 
> a pain but it mucks the printing up as well the results do not look 
> good covered in #VALUE! . What is the trick to preventing the 
> display of aforementioned string.

o You shouldn't really think of suppressing the error message, but 
instead of avoiding the error. (But that may be what you mean.) So 
you could check the result of your formula using ISERR() or ISERROR() 
and replace the message with whatever you prefer - possibly blank or 
null. But I don't recommend this.

o How about correcting your data? If you want to do calculations on 
it, the data really shouldn't have text values of any sort. (Are you 
sure that blank cells are not automatically interpreted as zeroes in 
a calculation?) It is quite easy to edit a spreadsheet to correct 
problems such as this, even if there are hundreds of suspect values. 
You could either modify the cell contents or simply create an 
additional column or row containing the modified values.

o Alternatively, you can test for the presence of a genuine number 
using the ISNUMBER() function. So
=IF(AND(ISNUMBER(D10),ISNUMBER(K10),D10>K10),D10-K10,"")
should do what you need.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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