For many users around the world, both personally and professionally, the Excel spreadsheet program is very important. It is used for multiple tasks, many of them related to working with numerical data on a larger or smaller scale. In fact, we can find this application in many of today’s computers.
Although at first it may seem extremely complex, which it is, we can also make a more simplified use of it. The results that we will obtain will depend on our knowledge or how much we stay in the characteristics of the application.
And it is that here we are going to find a huge number of formulas and functions with which to operate with our numerical data in Excel. At the same time, the application itself tries to help us with all of this by offering samples of how to use the formulas, or error messages when something goes wrong.
What is Excel #VALUE Error
In fact, in these lines we want to focus on the #VALUE error that many of you may be familiar with. To give you an idea of all this, it is important to know that when this particular message appears, it means that there is something wrong in the structure of the formula . In the same way, it may be the case that the error is given because there is something wrong in the content of the cells that are referred to from the formula.
Keep in mind that the #VALUE error is one of the most common in Microsoft Excel. It is precisely for this reason that sometimes it will cost us a little more than normal to locate the exact cause of it. With everything and with it we want to talk about some solutions, the most common, that you can carry out to solve this failure that we are talking about. This will improve our experience in daily use with the spreadsheet program.
Fix crash message in spreadsheet
As we told you before, there are several the most common cases for which the aforementioned #VALUE error can occur. Therefore, below, we explain the most common so that you can locate them as soon as possible and solve them in your Excel projects.
- Unexpected text value – One of the issues that can trigger the error is when trying to operate on a cell that, instead of a numeric value, contains some text. When referring to it through a formula, the program will return this error. To solve it we just have to remove that text and add a correct data type.
- Use of special characters : something similar happens when in Excel we try to operate with contents that include some type of special character or invalid data format. It serves as a clear example of all this that we try to operate with values that include brackets or parentheses in the cell, which would return the aforementioned #VALUE error.
- Invalid Function Argument – This error can also occur when bad data is entered that does not match the function reference. For example, if we try to operate with the dates of two cells, but one of them contains a text. The formula does not expect that original reference, and returns the commented error. We only have to enter a date format in both cells to operate.
- Dates used as text : and continuing with date type data in Excel, we must take into account that when entering them by hand in text mode, the program can return #VALUE. That is why what is recommended in this program is to enter the correct format for this type of data in particular.