Page 358 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

340 Understanding Error Values
Table 2-1
Error Value
#DIV/0
#N/A
#NAME?
#NULL!
#NUM!
#REF!
#VALUE!
Meaning
Division by zero
No value available
Excel doesn’t recog- nize a name
You specified an intersection of two cell ranges whose cells don’t actually intersect
Problem with a number in the formula
Invalid cell reference
Wrong type of argu- ment in a function or wrong type of operator
Error Values in Excel
Causes
The division operation in your formula refers to a cell that contains the value 0 or is blank.
Technically, this is not an error value but a special value that you can manually enter into a cell to indicate that you don’t yet have a necessary value.
This error value appears when you incor- rectly type the range name, refer to a deleted range name, or forget to put quo- tation marks around a text string in a for- mula (causing Excel to think that you’re referring to a range name).
Because the space is the intersection, this error will occur if you insert a space instead of a comma (the union operator) between ranges used in function argu- ments.
This error can be caused by an invalid argument in an Excel function or a for- mula that produces a number too large or too small to be represented in the worksheet.
This error occurs when you delete a cell referred to in the formula or if you paste cells over the ones referred to in the formula.
This error is most often the result of specifying a mathematical operation with one or more cells that contain text.
If a formula in your worksheet contains a reference to a cell that returns an error value, that formula returns that error value as well. This can cause error values to appear throughout the worksheet, thus making it very dif- ficult for you to discover which cell contains the formula that caused the original error value so that you can fix the problem.