One of the most frustrating things for new users of excel is dealing with the occasional Excel error. So in this screencast, I'm going to go through troubleshooting errors and Excel formulas. Excel is quite smart in that if you type in something like a formula like 4 divided by 5 + 6. And if you forget to include that last parentheses. So this would be 4 divided by 11, then when you press enter it's going to say we found a typo. And we are trying to correct it to 4 divided 5 + 6 with a closed parenthesis in the denominator. And a lot of times you should look through that and you can just accept the correction. However, Excel doesn't always have the best solution in mind. So if I wrote this upper left one, which we worked through in a previous screencast. And I go 1 + 2 x 3, and if I forget to close the parentheses, and I just do divided by 4 x 5, and I press Enter. It says that they found in error and a typo and they try to correct it to the following. And if you just blindly just press Yes, you notice that Excel put the last parentheses on the very end. And this is actually not what we intended by this formula here. So you got to be careful, even though Excel does do a really good job of correcting some of these errors. You should just double-check. Some of the more common errors that you might come across are shown right here. You might have a DIV over 0, a #NAME, #VALUE their your cell might be just filled in with a bunch of pound signs. And so in this screencast, I'm going to kind of of show you what these mean. And it gives you a better idea of how to fix them if you do encounter some of these errors. And there's also this little pesky green button on the top, this green triangle and I'll explain what that is. This table here summarizes the common error codes that you're going to get in Excel. You have this DIV/0 that means you're trying to divide by zero in a formula. We have this #NAME question mark, that's the name of function or the variable's not recognized. We have a #NUM, number error, that's usually because you have an invalid argument. Or the result is too big or too small for Excel. #REF, reference is not valid, it's likely been deleted. #VALUE, the formula uses the wrong type of argument. Perhaps you're trying to use text where numbers should be used. And then finally if you just see a bunch of pound signs, hashtag signs. Then that just means that the cell is too narrow to display the result. So let me go through an example of each of these. So if we try to take something like =4/0, you mathematicians out there might realize that you can't divide by 0. And then that gives you a #DIV/0 error. Sometimes you might think there's a function available, but really there isn't. So if I try to, for some reason I think that there's a =charlie function and I try to use 4. It doesn't recognize the Charlie function, And so we get this #NAME error. Maybe you think that you have a variable named, but really you don't. So in other words, maybe I have n which has a value of 4. And you think you have named that n, and if you try to do 4+n, Enter. It gives you this #NAME error. So the name error can be caused if you don't have the right function, you're not using a suitable function. And also if you have a variable that you're trying to use that is not named. The next error is a number error, this is commonly caused by the result doesn't make sense. And again you mathematicians out there might realize that you can't take the square root of a negative number. And so if the function just doesn't really make sense with those arguments, then you're going to get this #NUM error. You can also get a #NUM error if you try to do a really big number. So if I took 5 raised to the 500th power, that's a really big number and Excel just can't handle that. Let me show you the next error, so first what I'm going to do is, I'm going to put in a 5 and a 4. And maybe in this cell I'm going to calculate the sum of those two cells. And we get a 9 and actually just down here, let me calculate that cell squared, just a simple example. This cell here in F6 is adding these two cells, but maybe for whatever reason you inadvertently decide to delete that entire row. So we've deleted that row and now we don't have that 5 anymore, and you see here you get this #REF error. So the reference error is primarily caused when you may have gotten rid of a cell by deleting. Or maybe you pasted over that cell with something else. And if I double-click in this formula, it has that reference, because we have removed that reference from the spreadsheet. I also wanted to point out, if you recall, this cell was F5 squared, errors will propagate through your worksheet. So you can always kind of backtrack them by by looking in them and double-clicking to see what is being referenced. Next, if you try to perform a function on something that doesn't make sense. So maybe we try to do the square root of hello, then that's obviously not going to make sense. So it'll give you this #VALUE. So a lot of times, maybe your arguments just don't make sense in your functions, it'll give you this #VALUE! If your cell has a bunch of number signs in it, so what I'm going to do is make this column a little bit smaller. And here I'm going to increase decimal. When you see a bunch of pound signs there, that probably means that it's just not big enough for that number. So I can go ahead and double-click on this border to reveal everything. So another example would be if you put in =pi() and if we tried to increase the decimal to display more. It's just not wide enough to show all the decimal places right now, and I can double-click on here to reveal them all. Finally, I wanted to just show you what this little green triangle means. If you do have an error, then you can click in that cell and you can click on this little Hazard icon there. And if you really want, you could get some help on this error. And there's just some other options here that you can explore. So I could click on Help on this error and it brings up how to correct a #NAME error. So hopefully this screencast will help you with troubleshooting the errors that you encounter. Hopefully they are seldom in your Excel spreadsheets.
