Comments on: Summing Text

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 16:03:00 +0000

Solution 1: I will often have a check for a numeric value or an error in this formula.

Solution 2: I'd be reluctant to make this change, not knowing what else would be calculated differently.

By: Daryl

Daryl — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 21:52:00 +0000

Here is a variation on this issue in Excel. I like to distinguish between
student grades of zero on a quiz and missing the quiz so that I can provide
more accurate student advising:

A B C Formulas in C
1 StudentQuiz 1 RawQuiz 1 Percent
2 Alice 9 75.00% =(B2/12)
3 Bob Absent #VALUE! =(B3/12)
4 Fred 8 66.67% =(B4/12)

Not only is Bob's mark not calculated by Excel, but because the formula in C3
returns an error, no summary arithmetic can be performed on Column C.

Solution 1: Replace formulas in C with =(SUM(B2:B2)/12), etc.

Solution 2: Select Tools | Options | Transition | Sheet options and check the
"Transition formula evaluation" box. Lotus 1-2-3 evaluates
strings as zero and will thus return 0.00% for Bob's mark while
allowing the raw "score" of "Absent."

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:27:00 +0000

Actually, Excel will add text and numbers. Set A1 to 100 then set A2 to ’100 (note the leading quote which makes this entry “text”). You can set A3 to A1 + A2, it will convert the text to a number, and then place the number 200 in A3. The issue is that Excel will indeed try to cast text to a numerical value in this context and will fail if unable to make the conversion. If you set A4 to =SUM(A1:A2), the answer will be 100. It won’t even try to convert any text entries.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 18:51:00 +0000

Wow, I’m practically famous now. First I get top billing on J-Walk’s Ask J-Walk, now a Daily Dose of Excel post with my name on it. I don’t know if you noticed the comment I left at J-Walk, but I was messing with VisiCalc circa 1979 and it lets you use the plus operand or the sum function with text. Why do I care about this? When auto-filling formulas it’s a pain to get #VALUE on some of the rows. I could always write a better formula and check for #VALUE (which I normally do) but I was just curious about it.