Excel Video 366 has more tricks with IF, ISERROR, and arrays. Today we’ll use ISERROR to look for errors and then use the IF statement to decide what to do with the errors. Note that if we replace errors with two double quotes “”, Excel will not count the error cell in the average calculation since AVERAGE ignores blank cells. On the other hand, if we replace the error with a 0, AVERAGE will include the 0 in calculating the average number of surgeries. It’s just a matter of deciding how you want to handle potential errors and knowing what Excel functions do with blank cells compared to zeros.
Watch for a clever way to count the number of errors in my range. You could use this in a variety of places in a spreadsheet to make sure that you don’t have any errors before you save, print, or give the spreadsheet to a physician or an administrator. Now that we’re familiar with arrays, counting errors is a fairly easy function to put together.
