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.
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.
Hi,
I 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.
he cant really read your mind Varada!
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.
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.
Thank you, thank you Neil!!!
That tip about turning off the error checking in the options tab really did the trick. Those triangles were driving me nuts.
Thanks again, Neil!
Joanne
Think about the consequences of turning error-checking off.
You may regret this when your figures don’t add up because some numbers were imported as text.
You can selectively turn off items such as “refers to empty cells” but turning them all off is simply sweeping a possible problem under the carpet. A more severe analogy is like suppressing pain and continuing to use the damaged limb. In my opinion, it’s better to know than be in the dark. You can click on the yellow alert diamond to ignore a specific error for the specific cell entry. For others, you might be very glad that you were warned about an inconsistent formula, a number stored as text, etc.
BTW in Excel 2007 you can change the triangle colour.
Thanks for the advice. I got rid of the green triangles by doing an error check and telling it to ignore the error wherever it appeared, one cell at a time. The error in this case was that I was adding numbers together (i.e. B1+C1+D1 into cell E1, to simplify) and not adding in the number in A1, so it thought I was making a possible error and gave me that annoying little green triangle.