Hiding Error Messages – Quick Tip

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Hello all

Chandoo has graciously, some may say stupidly, given me access to post on Chandoo.org.

I have been a reader of Chandoo.org for about 2 years and have spent most of my time contributing to the Forums where I have just posted my 950th post.

I have written a few small posts which Chandoo has used, and I wrote a major post on Monte Carlo Simulation and Data Tables:

http://chandoo.org/wp/2010/05/06/data-tables-monte-carlo-simulations-in-excel-a-comprehensive-guide/

Which was well recieved.

I will be starting to post about once per week and will be introducing a series of real life problems and how they can be tackled using Excel.

Hiding Error Messages

I like to leave certain error messages in place because they can show you what your data is doing, but they look horrible when you print out reports.

One way around this is to use functions like =Iserr or =Iserror to trap the error and display something else

Eg: A formula =A1/A2 will divide A1 by A2 and give you an answer,

but if A2 is 0 you will get a Divide Zero Error #DIV/0!

To fix that you can use the =IFERROR Function =IFERROR(A1/A2,0) which will now give you a zero if A2 is zero

But if you don’t mind seeing, or want to see, the errors on screen, but don’t want to print them out you can have Excel hide the error messages at Print time.

Page Setup - Sheet Options

How:

Goto the Page Setup menu
On the Sheet Tab use the Cell errors as:
and select <Blank>, “–“ or #N/A as appropriate

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11 Responses to “Use Alt+Enter to get multiple lines in a cell [spreadcheats]”

  1. Ketan says:

    @Chandoo:
    One more useful trick.......
    In a column you have no. of data in rows and need to copy in the next row from the previous row, no need to go for the previous rows but entering Alt + down arrow, you will get the list of data, (in asending order), entered in the previous rows...

  2. Jorge Camoes says:

    This is another great tip. I use this all the time to make sense of some *very* long formulas. As soon as the formula is debugged I remove the break.

  3. Tony Rose says:

    Great tip Chandoo!

    I use this feature often and it has even gotten the, "how did you do that" response.
    Thanks!

  4. Chandoo says:

    @Ketan: Alt+down arrow is an awesome tip. I never knew it and now I am using it everyday.

    @Jorge, Tony: Agree... 🙂

  5. how can we merge a two sheet.

  6. yan says:

    excellent idea. Chandoo you are genious

  7. Hi chandoo,
    I have used ctrl+enter to break the cell. But I did not get the result.

    Please tell me how can i break the cell in multiple lines.
     

  8. Yasir says:

    hi Chandoo....
    how we can use Alt+Enter in multiple rows at the same time please reply hurry i have lot of work and have no time and i m stuck in this. 🙁

  9. Ahmad B. Al-Qadeeri says:

    Alt+J worked once 🙁
    So I found another more reliable way:
    =SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(13),"")
    Where A2 is the cell that contains the line breaks which the code for it is CHAR(13). It will replace it with whatever inside the ""

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