Question

A client of mine has a major application written and running in excel 2003 ( I know, and they know, that it is a mistake, and they are waiting for it to be properly incorporated into their SAP application. They have been waiting for many years. ). Most of the time it works fine, however this week they had a problem, and the data was returning #value entries.

As I looking into this, I identified that a DSUM function was returning #value, which was then being spread across other places ( did I mention that there is no data verification in the VBA code? ) When I looked at the function, which is summing a column in a separate sheet, with a conditional, it identified a number of problems in the data, but even when I fixed them, and the Function analysis indicated no errors, it still returned #value.

I would post some of the code, but there is a 4700 row sheet involved, which is rather inpractical. Can anyone suggest what I might be able to do to progress this? Why is the DSUM returning #value problems, when there is no indication of any errors in the source sheet? I have searched through the column, and all of the values are valid numbers.

Sorry to be a little vague, but if anyone can give me suggestions as to how to progress, it would be appreciated. Excel and VBA are not my real specialities.

Answer 1

The only way I could get a #value was 3 fold:

1. If the criteria (the 3rd parameter) contained less that 2 cells.
2. If the data had a #VALUE in it that was propagated through.
3. Or if the first row of the database/table contained a value instead of text (even a number formatted as text fails in my example).

Do you still have the offending version of the spreadsheet? Might be worth ensuring the first row of data for errors particularly cells that look like text but have values in them (i.e., cell formatting can be used to display text even if there is a value in the cell, or if the first row is also calculated).

Hope this helps, and do let us know how you get on.

Dave