Microsoft Office

Making Your Worksheets Error-Free 32
Using Formula AutoCorrect
When you enter a formula that has a syntax error, Excel attempts to determine the problem and offers a
suggested correction. The accompanying figure shows an example of a proposed correction.
Be careful when accepting corrections for your formulas from Excel because it doesn’t always guess correctly.
For example, I entered the following formula (which has mismatched parentheses):
=AVERAGE(SUM(A1:A12,SUM(B1:B12))
Excel then proposed the following correction to the formula:
=AVERAGE(SUM(A1:A12,SUM(B1:B12)))
You may be tempted to accept the suggestion without even thinking. In this case, the proposed formula is syntactically
correct — but not what I intended. The correct formula is
=AVERAGE(SUM(A1:A12),SUM(B1:B12))
Blank cells are not blank
Some Excel users have discovered that by pressing the spacebar, the contents of a cell seem to erase.
Actually, pressing the spacebar inserts an invisible space character, which isn’t the same as erasing the cell.
For example, the following formula returns the number of nonempty cells in range A1:A10. If you “erase”
any of these cells by using the spacebar, these cells are included in the count, and the formula returns an
incorrect result.
=COUNTA(A1:A10)
If your formula doesn’t ignore blank cells the way that it should, check to make sure that the blank cells are
really blank cells. One way is to choose Home ➪ Editing ➪ Find & Select ➪ Go To (or press F5 or
Ctrl+G), which displays the Go To dialog box. Click the Special button and then choose the Blanks option
in the Go To Special dialog box. Excel will select all blank cells so that you can spot cells that appear to be
empty but are not.
Extra space characters
If you have formulas or use procedures that rely on comparing text, be careful that your text doesn’t contain
additional space characters. Adding an extra space character is particularly common when data has been
imported from another source.
Excel automatically removes trailing spaces from values that you enter, but trailing spaces in text entries are not
deleted. It’s impossible to tell, just by looking at a cell, if text contains one or more trailing space characters.
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