I am starting a series of articles on formulas in Excel and Google Sheets. I am putting these 2 together because most of the formulas work on both platforms pretty much the same way. I will skip the basics, like SUM or AVERAGE and will try to write about the formulas that do not get invited to the party so often, the first one: IFERROR.
The problem
If you heard about VLOOKUP, you probably know what happens when it finds no value after searching, you get this message.
For the most part, this is not a problem. However, if you want to build more complex models, you may not like the #N/As scattered all around your spreadsheets. This is where IFERROR is handy.
The syntax
Each formula has its own syntax, in our case it is the following:
IFERROR(What we test, What we display in exchange)
If we want to replace the #N/A with a blank space, we write the following formula:
IFERROR(VLOOKUP(…),” “)