Chameleon text and number in spreadsheets. Watch out for this trap.

In Excel, a text is sometimes treated as a text and sometimes as a number. This can be quite confusing and can lead to wrong calculations.

Users have to be aware of this and ensure that the cells in a summation are numbers.

Here is an illustration.


A1 and A2 contain numbers 11 and 12.
A3 contains a text "13".

In an addition where each cell is explicitly added, as in cell B4, "13" is treated as the number 13.

But.

In a sum formula, as in cell B5, "13" is treated as a text and is not added to the sum.

Spreadsheet users have to be very careful that each cell in a summation is a number. Otherwise, the cell "number" will not be added.

This chameleon quality applies to some other formulas also.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I want to trace precedents in Google Sheets

I want to trace precedents in Google Sheets. It is not possible to do that in Google Sheets. The closest way is to open the file with Excel or LibreOffice Calc. But there are compatibility problems with special formulas and macros. (Update: Please see the comments for this post)
Read more

LibreOffice Calc Users have Powerful Precedent Tracing Tools

LibreOffice Calc has a Detective menu to trace precedents and dependents. Similar to Excel's formula auditing tools, the tracings are limited to one cell at a time, and each click goes one level further. This new book,  Easily understand your spreadsheet model and detect errors with influence charts (For LibreOffice Calc), improves the detective tracing ability with LibreOffice Basic programming. Calc users can now trace precedents and dependents over many cells, or many levels at once. There are more functions described in the book. This unique spreadsheet book shows you how you can quickly and easily gain an overview of your spreadsheet model, with just a few clicks. The automatically generated overview, with the specialized software (VisualCheck, tested with LibreOffice 5.3) that comes with the book, allows easy understanding and error detection, as illustrated in the book. This book is meant for all types of spreadsheet users. It is meant for both novice and exp...
Read more