All articles with 'debugging' Tag

Once in a while everyone is bound to come across this problem. You type a formula in a cell, then you press ENTER. Bam! nothing happens. You check if a donut chunk went in to the key board and some how jammed the ENTER key. So press it again, this time harder. But nothing. Excel […]

Here is a familiar scenario: You are building a dashboard. Naturally, it has a few worksheets – data, assumptions, calculations and output. As you make changes to input data, you constantly switch to calculations (or output) page to check if the numbers are calculating as desired. This back and forth is slows you down.

Use Watch Window to reduce development time.

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In the 37th session of Chandoo.org podcast, Let’s debug ’em #VALUEs & #N/As.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• Introduction to Excel formula errors
• The easy kind: syntax errors
• The triky ones: # ERRORs
• Fixing errors – using IFERROR & ISERROR
• Error checking & debug options
• Using Errors deliberately – charts & data validation
• A challenge for you – produce #NULL error
• Conclusions

For most of us, the prospect of inheriting a large, undisclosed sum of money is bleak. But we have high probability of inheriting a complex Excel workbook with 19 worksheets and 2300 rows of data and 195 formulas. The kind where entire rainbow colors are used to color code accounts receivable statuses. Then what do we do? We spend a whole afternoon (and then the rest of the month) breaking our head trying to figure out why the total revenues are only $ 41.2 million when profits are $ 99.23 million.

So how do we deal with our inheritance?

Here is a quick tip to help you get started. Disable “Direct editing mode“.

Here is a quick macro tip that I stumbled on to while debugging some code yesterday (ya, ya, call me workaholic for coding on a weekend…) You can select expressions in your code and place mouse pointer on that for a second to find what value it evaluates to (of course, this works only on […]

In this installment of spreadcheats we will learn how to understand excel formula errors and fix them. The #DIV/0!, #NAME?, #N/A, #NULL!, #NUM!, #REF!, #VALUE! errors and how to fix them.

Can you imagine building a complex worksheet without formulas? I can’t. While no one can dispute the usability of formulas, we all know how painful it is when an excel formula returns a mysterious error and we don’t know what is causing the error.