When working in spreadsheet programs such as Google Sheets, there may be times where formulas result in an error.
If you have a large dataset that you are working on, having many different errors can make your sheet look messy and hard to read.
You may want to end up hiding all those errors to make your sheet look more organized.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to hide errors in Google Sheets.
Table of Contents
Hiding Errors Using IFERROR
One great way to hide errors is by using the IFERROR function.
The IFERROR function will allow you to return any value you want if there is an error value, or you can make it so that errors show up as blanks.
The syntax of the IFERROR Function is:
=IFERROR(value, [value_if_error])
- value – this is the value to return if value is not an error
- value_if_error – this is an optional argument that is set to blank by default. This is the value that will be returned if the first argument results in an error
Here is an example of how the IFFERROR function can be used to hide error messages.
First here is an example of a spreadsheet where I have multiple formulas performing calculations. Some of these formulas result in an error:
By wrapping these formulas in an IFERROR, I can now get the error messages to disappear:
Again the second argument of the function is optional. If you leave it blank, all errors will turn to blanks. But you can also control what is returned by using the second argument of the function like this:
Dividing by Zero
You can also use IFERROR when you are dividing by zero to remove #DIV/0! errors.
The way that you use is to hide error messages when dividing by zero is the same as using it with the previous examples:
Filtering Errors
Lastly, if you want to hide the entire row that has an error message you can do that with filtering.
To do this, highlight your data range, and then in the top menu select Data>Create a filter.
Next, select the filter button at the top of the column that contains the errors:
Then you can deselect the Error from the displayed values and select OK
Every row that has an error should now disappear from your current view
Closing Thoughts
I have now shown the based way to control for error messages in Google Sheets which is using the IFERROR function.
With this function, you can hide all kinds of error messages and display either a blank cell or return any value that you want. This also works when dividing by zero to remove the #DIV/0 errors.
When you combine this function with filtering you can completely hide the rows that contain the errors from being viewable in your spreadsheet, which will certainly come in handy as you continue to work with data.
More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Hide a Row Based On Cell Value
How to Use Checkboxes
Formula Parse Errors