If you have been working in Excel for a while, you will come across a time when you will face intentional errors in Excel. Sometimes you will know that your formula will return an error but still want to continue with the formula because maybe you want exactly that.
Excel will show you errors if it has problems calculating. Although, Excel will try to solve these errors and will show you that your worksheet has some sort of error. Sometimes you may not need to correct your errors in Excel. Or maybe, you simply don’t know how to solve the error and just want to see the warning signs in the workbook.
In such a case, you might want to ignore all the errors in Excel. In this guide, we will show you how you can ignore all the errors in Excel quickly and easily.
So, let’s get into it.
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Ignoring Errors in Excel
There are many errors in Excel and you will become familiar with these errors if you regularly use Excel. But sometimes you may want these errors to stay in Excel and don’t need to fix the error.
There are several error codes in Excel. For example, there are #NUM!, #DIV/0!, #NAME?, #VALUE!, #REF!, and #NULL! Errors. Each of these error codes has its reasons and Excel will show you these errors with an error indicator.
For example, If you have seen our SUM not working guide, you’d remember that SUM might not work because some error values may have been hidden.
By default, Excel will show you these errors with an indicator. In a specific worksheet, if you ignore an error for a cell, that error will not appear in any additional error checks you may do later. But, if you do want to ignore errors, then you can revert the process by tracing back your steps of ignoring the errors.
In this guide, we will show you how You can ignore all these errors in Excel in 4 ways.
Hide Error Indicators
Cells with formula errors are indicated in Excel with a triangle in the top-left corner of each cell. You can see an example of this in the next image.
As you can see in the image, there is a green triangle in the top left corner of the cell where we have a #DIV/0! Error. You can get this error if you divide any number by a 0.
If you click on the cell containing an error, you will see a yellow box. In the image below you can see an example.
If you want to ignore this error, you can just click on the yellow box to reveal a new menu that looks like the following image:
From there, just click on Ignore Error. As you can see, in the menu, you can also see some information on the error, including some help on this error. But from this menu, you can ignore this error in one click by clicking the Ignore Error option.
If You Do Not Want to See Any Errors
If you do not want to see any errors, you can turn off error indicators in Excel. In this case, you will not get any error indicators (the green triangles in the top left corner)
To do this, just follow the following steps:
1. Click on File>More>Options.
2. On the new pop-up menu, go to Formulas and then look for a checkbox that says Enable Background Error Checking. Make sure to uncheck this box.
After you do this, you will find that Excel will no longer show you an error sign in the form of that green triangle.
Ignoring Errors with a Shortcut
You can also use a shortcut to get to the Error correction menu. To do this, you can click on the Yellow triangle box that we showed you earlier. Just click on the box as we showed in the image.
After you click on this option, in the formula tab, just uncheck the Enable Background Error Checking checkbox like before.
And you’re done. Excel will ignore all the errors after you uncheck the box.
By Using IFERROR
The previous methods are for ignoring the visual warnings of Excel. But what if you want to see something else when you encounter an error? Or maybe, you want to see a blank space where Excel would show you an error otherwise.
This can be very handy if you want to ignore errors in specific cells while still letting Excel warn you of the other errors. Let’s go back to our previous example of the #DIV/0! Error.
Say we have a similar case where we are getting a #DIV/0! Error. You can choose to simply ignore this calculation if it were to return an error.
To do this, type the formula:
=IFERROR(1/0,””)
In our Microsoft 365 application, the formula looks like this:
Now, this formula may look complex. So let us just explain. After the parenthesis, we will write our desired calculation. In our case, it was 1/0, which would normally return a #DIV/0! Error.
But as we wrote the IFERROR formula, Excel will not give you the error. Rather Excel will replace the error message with what we wrote in the quotation marks (“ “). As we did not write anything in the quotation marks, Excel will just display nothing in that cell.
If we were to put a hyphen (-) in the quotation marks, Excel would return a hyphen instead of the error message.
You get the idea. You can put anything in quotation marks and Excel would show that instead of an error message.
Wrapping UP
In this guide, we have shown you 4 methods by that you can ignore all the errors in your Excel file. This includes errors in your formula or simple typing mistakes that you may have made. The methods above will help you ignore all the possible errors in your excel file.
These methods come in handy especially when you intentionally make a mistake and just don’t want to let excel bother you. Or maybe you are just trying to make a worksheet with Excel for your interns to do some error correction tests.
Whatever your reasons may be, we hope that you will master all the methods above to make your Excel worksheet error-free. In case you need some additional help, our handy comment section is always there for you.
So why wait? Just go out there and ignore some Excel errors.
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