List of Excel Errors

This page lists the different errors you may encounter in your Excel cells, along with some explanations to better understand them.

#DIV/0

This error means that you are trying to divide by zero, which is not possible, hence this error.

For example, =50/A1 will return this error if cell A1 contains 0 or is empty.

#NAME?

This error occurs when the function name or the name of a cell (or range of cells) you are trying to use is misspelled. Excel cannot find the requested function or name and returns this error.

For example, =SOM(A1:A3) will return this error because the SUM function is misspelled.

Similarly, with =SUM(name) you will get the same error if no range of cells has been named "name".

Note that if you forget to add quotes to a text value such as =IF(A1="",NO,"YES"), you will get the same error because Excel will not consider "NO" as text but will look for a function or name named "NO" and return this error if it finds nothing.

#REF!

This error occurs when the reference to a cell, range of cells, or sheet no longer exists.

For example, the following formula references a cell in Sheet 2 ="Result: "&Sheet2!A1. If this sheet is now deleted, the reference to this sheet will no longer exist, the formula will be replaced by ="Result: "&#REF!A1, and will return the #REF! error.

#N/A

This value appears when there is no possible result, it is not really an error but rather a value that means "no result possible in this configuration".

This value often appears with search functions such as VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, MATCH, etc.

For example, if you use the VLOOKUP function and the "Lookup_value" is not found in the range of cells, the value #N/A will be returned.

This value can also appear when you forget to fill in a mandatory argument (in this case, no result is possible).

#VALUE!

This error occurs when the entered value does not match the expected value.

For example, if you use the INDEX function and instead of the row number, you enter a value that is not a number, you will get the #VALUE! error because it does not match the type of value expected by the function.

Similarly, if you try to add a number with text =50+"test", you will get this same error because a text value does not match the type of value expected for an addition.

#SPILL!

This error indicates that a formula that is supposed to return multiple values cannot do so because something is blocking the necessary cell range (at least one of the cells is not empty).

For example, if you enter =TEXTSPLIT("a/b/c","/") in A1 and any value in B1, you will get this error because this formula needs 3 cells to spill (in this case, just erase the content of the useful cells to remove this error).

#NULL!

This error appears when two cell ranges have no intersection or simply in case of missing : or ,.

For example, =SUM(A1:A2 A3:A4) will return this error because there is no intersection between the two specified cell ranges. It could also be due to missing , to separate the two cell ranges to be added.

#NUM!

This error occurs when you try to use invalid numeric values, and it may also occur if the result is a too large number (for example, =1000^1000 will return #NUM!).

#CALC!

This very annoying error appears when you nest arrays in a formula, even if the nesting is clean and does not overwrite any data, because Excel simply handles arrays very poorly (unlike Google Sheets).

For example, with the formula =MAP(A1:A5,LAMBDA(i,TEXTSPLIT(i,","))) and data separated by commas in column A, this will return this error because Excel handles arrays poorly, and there's nothing you can do about it. In this case, you often need to perform the calculation using multiple formulas to avoid this error, or possibly use Google Sheets for such calculations (the equivalent in Google Sheets of this example =MAP(A1:A5,LAMBDA(i,SPLIT(i,","))) works fine and does not return any error).

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This specific display usually occurs when the cell width is too small to display a numeric value. In this case, simply widen the column to modify the display.