Green Triangles
In Excel XP (aka 2002 or version 10) and later, you may see a green triangle in your cell. It looks like the red triangle that appears when you have a comment in the cell, but of course, it’s green.
The green triangle is Excel telling you that there is a potential error in the cell. Sometimes the error is obvious like a #DIV/0! error. Other times it’s not. One such time is when you have text in a cell that looks like a number. Like this
You can click on the little exclamation point as shown above to see what Excel thinks the potential error is and to help you find a solution if it’s a real error.
Now I will read your mind. No, I don’t know why error triangles are green and comments are red. Poor planning, I suppose. Under Tools>Options>Error Checking, you can change the color among other things.
Scott Bable:
Dick…I’ve found the error triangles tend to show up more when I import or paste data from another source, such as an Access query. I’ve also found that the main reason for the error triangle is that other apps tend to add spaces to the data, usually enough spaces to fill up the length of the field. One thing, in my case, that helps in removal of the error triangle is to remove all excess spaces from the worksheet when it’s imported. I use John Walkenbach’s PUP5 utility to remove the excess spaces. This works for me 90% of the time in removing the error triangles.
12 May 2004, 7:26 amVarada:
Hi,
21 December 2004, 1:28 amI am also facing a similar issue. can i avoid these errors by writing some code in the server side. i.e in my Java program. i can’t use any utilities.
please help me in this regard.
my email is varadhagopal@yahoo.com
Thanks
Varada.
ross:
he cant really read your mind Varada!
21 December 2004, 4:21 pmVicki:
Thank you…I just upgraded at work to Office XP and we do a lot of cut and paste from QMF etc. This was driving me insane. I just turned off the Number as Text option and that got rid of all of my problems.
21 February 2005, 9:06 amNeil:
To turn this feature off: Go to Tools/Options on the menu bar and select the Error Checking tab. Deselect the checkbox which states Enable background error checking.
2 May 2005, 8:14 amRonald Diack:
Thank you, thank you Neil!!!
4 August 2007, 3:46 am