Microsoft Office Development and Consultancy

Excel

Documenting Your Formulas

It is very common to add a formula your to worksheet and then later on forget what calculation it is performing.

Using Named Ranges (with descriptive names) can help but there may be times when you need to add several words or a short sentence.

You could use Comments although displaying these can often be time consuming.

There is an alternative to use Comments and that is to embed the text inside the actual formula.

This can be achieved by using the N() function.

Using the N() Function

This function returns a value converted to a number although when text is submitted the value zero is always returned.

You can use this function to add descriptive comments inside your formulas by adding this function to your existing formula.

Because this function will always return zero when text is submitted this will have no effect on the result of the formula.

Remember to always put your text inside quotation marks.

Example - SS

You can then quickly determine what the formula is calculating by selecting the cell and looking at the Formula Bar.

The N() function always returns zero when text is submitted so it will never interfere with your calculations.