Working with Formulas / Common Errors When Creating Formulas
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As you work in Microsoft Excel and become more familiar with creating formulas and develop quite a few formulas and functions you will realize that there are places that you have common errors. I am going to kind of outline what these errors might be. The first one is forgetting to start a formula with an equal sign. Always make sure that your formulas have an equal sign. Matching your parentheses: another very common error is not to match your parentheses when you create a formula. Notice that here I have a nested function within another function and again, you want to make sure your parentheses match up, otherwise you will have an error in your formula. Another very common error is to forget the colon in between a range. Always remember to designate a range with the first cell reference then the colon and then the final ending cell reference for that range. Also, enter in all required arguments for each function. It's nice using the Auto Function Complete command to create your functions as it will help you not forget certain arguments that you might need within your function. Another common error is to not use quotation marks around text values. You have to enclose all text that is treated as text and not numeric values, within quotation marks. Notice that here I have above and below and they're both enclosed in quotation marks. Always enter numbers without formatting, so don't type in 500 dollars by typing in dollar sign 500. Enter in 500 and then apply formatting to that cell. And finally, one of the more common errors that you'll find as you develop your functions and formulas is Circular References. Now what a Circular Reference is, is when you refer to the same cell that is actually included in the total for your formula, so it's kind of circling around and it will keep circling around indefinitely because you're including the total within your actual function or formula and Excel will point that our for you and then you need to just kind of step through your function and try to locate where you might have the Circular Reference. You can use your Evaluate Formula option that is found in your Formula Auditing group within the Formulas tab of your Ribbon. But use your tools that Excel offers for evaluating your formulas and functions and that should help you find your errors. These are just a listing of some of the more common formulas or function errors. This concludes Chapter 8. Let's move on to the next Chapter.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Microsoft Excel 2007 |
| Author: | Cheryl Brumbaugh Duncan |
| SKU: | 33810 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-21-6 |
| Release Date: | 2007-10-30 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 115 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | For Online University members only |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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