Excel - Ignoring the contents of cells when there are letters in thecell

[James McErlain]

When using MS Works I can enter letters and numbers in a cell and the total of the cells in a row will be calculated correctly(for my particular requirement) by ignoring anyone of the cells in the row which has letters and numbers together. All the cells are formated as 'General'.

When I try to do this task in Excel it gives an error in the result cell.
Note that any cell may have a mixture of letters and cells.
Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you
James


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[T. Valko]

Use the SUM function.

=SUM(A1:A3)

Instead of doing this:

=A1+A2+A3

The SUM function will ignore any cells that contain text.

 

[Gary''s Student]

If A1 thru A3 contain:

1
junk
3

then =A1+A2+A3 will show an error
however =SUM(A1:A3) will show 4
This is because the SUM() function ignores text.

 

[Gord Dibben]

SUM function ignores text cells.

ab123 is text

123 is a number

=SUM(A1:A10) will sum cells with numbers only.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP