Excel’s default behavior of treating blank cells as zeros arises from its inability to return a truly blank cell in a formula. Instead, it substitutes blank cells with zeros during calculations.

Use Excel's COUNTBLANK Formula This spreadsheet contains hundreds of rows of data. Some rows contain blank cells but data in other cells, while some rows contain no data altogether.

Blank cells can spell trouble. Here's an easy way to fill in those blanks and protect the validity of your data.

Excel has over 475 formulas in its Functions Library, but we've selected the most popular, from date and time functions to mathematics and simple data manipulation.