Principles of Financial Modelling

CHAPTER 22Information Functions

INTRODUCTION

This chapter covers Excel's Information functions. These generally provide information either about the content, position or format of a cell, or about the location and environment of a cell, range, worksheet or workbook:

• ISTEXT returns TRUE if its argument is text; ISNONTEXT returns TRUE if its argument is not text.
• ISNUMBER returns TRUE if its argument is a number.
• ISBLANK returns TRUE if its argument is blank.
• ISFORMULA returns TRUE if it refers to a cell that contains a formula.
• ISLOGICAL returns TRUE if its argument is a logical value.
• ISREF returns TRUE if its argument is a reference.
• ISEVEN or ISODD return TRUE if the number referred to is even or odd respectively.
• ISERROR returns TRUE if the value is any error value. ISERR returns TRUE if the value is any error value except #N/A.
• ERROR.TYPE returns a number corresponding to an error type.
• NA returns the error value #N/A.
• ISNA returns TRUE if the value is the #N/A error value.
• N returns a value converted to a number.
• TYPE indicates the data type of a value.
• CELL provides information about the formatting, location or contents of a cell.
• INFO provides information about the current operating environment.
• SHEET returns the sheet number of the referenced sheet, and SHEETS returns the number of sheets in a reference.

Note that there are other Excel functions which provide similar forms of information to some of these. For example, the functions ADDRESS, ROW, ROWS, COLUMN and ...