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excelexcel-formulaarray-formulas

Determining if Excel cell contains array formula or text value


I have a big table where one column contains a formula each row (an array formula, to be specific), which returns with a string. But some of the formulas are overwritten with a similar string value.

I would like to create a conditional formatting to color the cells which are overwritten.

How can I create a formula to determine if the cell contains an array formula or a simple text value?

I have already tried =CELL("type", A2), but it returned "l" even if the cell contained a formula.


Solution

  • Thankfully the function FORMULATEXT does just that in the 2013 version of Excel.

    It sounds like you want to determine if there is or is not a formula vice return the text so I would recommend adding an IFNA function as well like the example below.

    =IFNA(FORMULATEXT(A1),"No Formula")
    

    You could even take that one step further with an IF statement around that.

    =IF(IFNA(FORMULATEXT(A1),"No Formula")="No Formula","This is simple text","This is a formula")
    

    Check out Bill Jelean's podcast on doing this in previous versions of Excel.

    Learn Excel 2010 - "=FORMULA TEXT() in Excel 2010": Podcast #1691