Before the introduction of the IFERROR formula in Excel 2007, if you wanted to hide errors displayed by some formulas you had to employ a combination of IF and the ISNA formulas, which resulted in Excel having to do the calculation twice. Once to establish whether the result was an error, and again if the result wasn’t an error. In big spreadsheets this meant significant perfomance issues. Thankfully Excel 2007 introduced the IFERROR formula which puts an end to these messy workarounds.
The IFERROR formula can be used as a ‘wrapper’ to hide many different errors; #DIV/0!, #NAME?, #NULL!, #NUM!, #REF!, #VALUE!, and one of the most common being VLOOKUP’s #N/A error.
In this tutorial we’re going to look at using the IFERROR to solve VLOOKUP’s #N/A error.
We’ll cover why we might want Excel to hide this error, and how we can tell Excel to display something more elegant in its place.
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