The #N/A error happens most often when a lookup function cannot find a result. You can manually remove the all of your #N/As or you can stop them in your original formula. A simple and effective way of trapping the #N/A errors and replacing them with whatever you would like is to use the ISNA() function.
ISNA() is a simple function that checks to see if a cell contains N/A. If it does it returns TRUE, if not it returns FALSE. For example, cell A1 has #N/A, in B1 you type ISNA(A1). The result would be TRUE. We can use this function in conjunction with other functions to test if a result will be NA before we see the result. For Example:
=VLOOKUP(E4,$A$4:$B$6,2,FALSE)
The function above looks in the table a4:b6 for whatever is in E4, if it finds it, it returns a result from column 2 of the table. If it does not find a result, it returns #N/A. We can stop the results from showing #N/A by using ISNA as below:
=IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP(E4,$A$4:$B$6,2,FALSE)),“”,VLOOKUP(E4,$A$4:$B$6,2,FALSE))
The formula above shows the result in the highlighted red section rather than #N/A. In this case it is showing a NULL (“”).
Joseph Harris
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