Preventing the display of #VALUE! in a spreadsheet

users
#1

Hi All ..

Having a problem here that is becoming a real PITA situation .

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

Thanks

Pete .

#2

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

#3

I too am running 4.3.7.2, but on what is known as Curtains, though you may still think of windows.

In my instance, blanks are interpreted as zeros, so your problem doesn't appear here.

However, a long-term annoyance to me is LO interpreting alpha chars as illicit in some formulae.

That was done in apparent slavish adherence to micro$$ bad practice; good old 123, and Mosaic Twin, took such chars to be zero.

Using your example on my system, if D10 = something possibly useful, such as "insert revenue here", the dreaded #VALUE! will appear.

You could try, z.b.,

=IF(sum(D10)-sum(K10)>0,sum(D10)-sum(K10),"")

For no apparent reason, that works to interpret alphas as zero, and so might work for you.

This example is unnecessarily verbose, just to illustrate the idea.

Other such redundant function employments have worked in other places, so you could tinker with the general notion.

trj

#4

HI ok .

I will test that out ..

I have managed to get round it right now using
=IF(COUNT(D10-K10)=2,D10-K10,"")

That seems to do the job and i cant see any ill effects on the way it works you may
have an improvement ....

Thanks

Pete .

#5

I fancy you mean
=IF(COUNT(D10,K10)=2,D10-K10,"")
- with a comma, not a minus sign.

Brian Barker

#6

There are a couple of options about how to treat strings in formulas.

Menu/Tools/Options/LibreOffice calc/Formula - Detailed calculation settings
- Custom

Miguel Ángel.

#7

Hi Pete,

pete nikolic schrieb:

Hi All ..

Having a problem here that is becoming a real PITA situation .

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! .

If the cells are really empty, that should not happen. I guess, that the cells are not empty, but contain a "Blank"-character or an empty string. In that case Calc tells you, that it cannot calculate with text.

What is the trick to preventing the display of aforementioned string

You can force the cell entries to be treated as numbers in a way, that text is treated a zero. That is done automatically if you use functions with an array as parameter oder explicitly with the function N.

=IF( N(D10)-N(K10)>0; N(D10)-N(K10);"")

For me the delimiter is a semicolon, I'm not sure about your comma as delimiter.

Kind regards
Regina

#8

Yep you got it typo on my part ...

Pete .