Return empty cell from formula in Excel

excel excel-formula
Bryan Ward picture Bryan Ward · Jul 13, 2009 · Viewed 725.7k times · Source

I need to return an empty cell from an Excel formula, but it appears that Excel treats an empty string or a reference to an empty cell differently than a true empty cell. So essentially I need something like

=IF(some_condition,EMPTY(),some_value)

I tried to do things such as

=IF(some_condition,"",some_value)

and

=IF(some_condition,,some_value)

and assuming B1 is an empty cell

=IF(some_condition,B1,some_value)

but none of these appear to be true empty cells, I'm guessing because they are the result of a formula. Is there any way to populate a cell if and only if some condition is met and otherwise keep the cell truly empty?

EDIT: as recommended, I tried to return NA(), but for my purposes this did not work either. Is there a way to do this with VB?

EDIT: I am building a worksheet that pulls in data from other worksheets that is formatted to the very specific demands of an application that imports the data into a database. I do not have access to change the implementation of this application, and it fails if the value is "" instead of actually empty.

Answer

Joe Erickson picture Joe Erickson · Jul 13, 2009

Excel does not have any way to do this.

The result of a formula in a cell in Excel must be a number, text, logical (boolean) or error. There is no formula cell value type of "empty" or "blank".

One practice that I have seen followed is to use NA() and ISNA(), but that may or may not really solve your issue since there is a big differrence in the way NA() is treated by other functions (SUM(NA()) is #N/A while SUM(A1) is 0 if A1 is empty).

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