Get excel to ignore cells with no value entered into them

[speedy18]

Another question from the excel dummy. I work in the oil industr
offshore drilling oil wells. I have built a spread sheet to total th
lengths of pipe that we have in use. Lets say that in column A, I hav
the individual items length entered. In column B i have it totallin
the lengths. For this example I only have 10 items in use. When i ge
to A11 there is no length entered. I have already entered the formula
for doing the math in the B column. So in B11 it contains the sam
value as B10 since there was no value entered into A11 for it to sum
this continues all the way down the page. This is really not a bi
problem but it would make the sheet look more proffesional if it lef
the blank cells blank. I have set up the very bottom cell on the shee
as the grand total cell so I will have the ending length already
Basically I want if the A cell is blank then the formula in the B cel
would make it remain blank. This may not be possible but if anyon
knows how to make it do it I would appreciate it.

Once again, thanks for all your help.
speed

 

[Chip Pearson]

Speedy,

Try writing your formulas in column B similar to the following:

=IF(A1="","",A1)

This will return an empty string rather than 0 if A1 is empty.
Otherwise, it will return the value in A1.


--
Cordially,
Chip Pearson
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Pearson Software Consulting, LLC
www.cpearson.com