Office 2013 In Depth

Proofing Your Formulas and Functions

Just because a formula or function returns a value, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s correct. Making sure that your formulas and functions are providing the correct results in your worksheets is incredibly fundamental; yet many Excel users assume that if Excel came up with that answer, it has to be right. Fortunately, Excel provides tools that can help you proof your formulas and functions.

There can be different causes for formulas or functions to return an incorrect value. For example, you might have made a syntax error in actually creating the formula or function. You might not have included the appropriate operators for a formula or you did not provide a function’s arguments in the correct order. ...