Finding and Replacing Error Values

Lindsay often has huge worksheets with hundreds of rows of calculated values. Inevitably there will be scattered cells with the #N/A error that she would like to all be 0 (or some other value) so she can use the cells in other formulas. Due to the calculations Lindsay is running, she feels an IF formula or other such method to anticipate and remove these values from the calculation is usually impossible, and it's very tedious to remove them by hand. Lindsay wonders if there is any way to do the equivalent of a "find and replace" on those error values.

There are a couple of ways you can approach this issue. One is to use the Go To feature in Excel. Simply follow these steps:

1. Press F5. Excel displays the Go To dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
2. Click Special. Excel displays the Go To Special dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
3. Make sure the Formulas radio button is selected.
4. The only check box that should be selected under Formulas is Errors.
5. Click OK. Excel selects all cells where the formula returned an error value.
6. Type 0 or whatever value you want.
7. Press Ctrl+Enter.

Note that this approach results in any error values being replaced, not just those with the #N/A error. If you have to make the replacements quite a bit or you want to only affect #N/A errors, you may want to use a macro to do the replacements:

Sub Replace_NAs()
    Dim C
    For Each C In ActiveSheet.UsedRange
        If Application.WorksheetFunction.IsNA(C) Then
            C.Value = 0
        End If
    Next
End Sub

You should note that all these options result in the formulas in the cells (those that returned the #N/A values) being permanently replace with a 0 or whatever value you specify. The only way to not replace the formulas is to change those formulas to use an IF statement to check for the error condition before applying the formula.