Deciphering Excel Error Prompts

Author: David H. Ringstrom

Excel spreadsheet users often are stopped in their tracks by inscrutable error prompts that arise from seemingly simple actions. In this unique course, Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, digs into the dark corners of Excel to give you the how and why behind many frequently encountered error prompts. You also gain exposure to a number of Excel’s features and learn what to do when Excel seemingly goes awry. David demonstrates every technique at least twice: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in the subscription-based Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) version of Excel. David draws your attention to any differences in the older versions of Excel (2021, 2019, 2016 and earlier) during the course as well as in his detailed handouts. David also provides an Excel workbook that includes most of the examples he uses during the course. Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based product that provides new feature updates as often as monthly. Conversely, the perpetual licensed versions of Excel have feature sets that don't change. Perpetual licensed versions have year numbers, such as Excel 2021, Excel 2019, and so on.

Publication Date: November 2023

Designed For
Practitioners seeking to use Excel more effectively by learning how to deal with error prompts.

Topics Covered

• Bringing Excel's green error-checking prompts under control by managing the underlying rules
• Determining at a glance whether a spreadsheet contains links to other workbooks
• Diagnosing formula errors, such as #VALUE!, #REF!, #N/A, and others
• Diagnosing the new #CALC error that can arise within improperly crafted dynamic array formulas
• Discovering how to avoid wasting time when saving workbooks as .XLS files by dispatching the Compatibility Checker
• Discovering new worksheet functions available in Excel 2016 and later
• Displaying subsets of data dynamically by way of the new FILTER worksheet function
• Eliminating the frustrating ""We can't do that to a merged cell"" error prompt
• Identifying situations where VLOOKUP may return #N/A instead of a value
• Identifying the various # sign errors Excel formulas can return
• Improving the integrity of spreadsheets with Excel's VLOOKUP function
• Improving the stability of Excel by deleting accumulations of temporary files in Windows

Learning Objectives

• Identify IFNA, IFERROR, and ISERROR functions and learn which versions of Excel support each of them
• Recognize how to improve the odds of Excel creating a backup copy of your work so you can recover easily from program crashes
• Explain why certain features, such as slicers, sparklines, and even charts, are disabled in some workbooks
• Identify which Excel feature serves as an alternative to the Merged Cells feature
• Identify in which version of Excel the FILTER function is available
• Identify the worksheet function that eliminates extraneous spaces from text within a worksheet

Level
Intermediate

Instructional Method
Self-Study

NASBA Field of Study
Computer Software & Applications (2 hours)

Program Prerequisites
Experience Working with Excel Spreadsheets.

Advance Preparation
None