Question about empty cells

[Zerex71]

Greetings,

I am curious about using empty cells in formulas in other cells - if I
leave a cell empty, is "empty" treated as a special state, or is a
value of 0.0 (or some other null value) implicit? It's not a big
deal, I'm just wondering about computations in other cells that depend
on cells which could be empty. I think I get the same result if I
leave the cell empty, or if it has a 0.0 value in it. I could, if I
wanted to get picky, set up my function to recognize a legitimate zero
and take a different result if there is actually a 0.0 there instead
of the user leaving it empty.

Mike

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Functions can return a number, text, or a boolean value (or an error),
but not null or empty. How that return value is evaluated depends on the
coercion implicit in the function.

If a numeric argument is expected, the empty cell value is coerced to 0.

If a text argument is expected, the empty cell is coerced to the null
string ("").

If a boolean argument is expected, the empty cell value is coerced to
FALSE.

 

[T. Valko]

It all depends on what functions the formula uses. Some functions ignore
empty cells while others will evaluate them as a 0 value.

Biff