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Demo: Is your financial data worksheet calculating the results you intended?

Applies to: Microsoft Office Excel 2003

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There’s nothing worse than distributing a beautifully detailed worksheet only to find you missed something: the wrong numbers are being added up. Microsoft Office Excel 2003 has lots of tools and tricks to help you catch a mistake before it goes out to the world. Excel will warn you that there may be an error in a formula even if you don’t notice. It’ll even flag it in red for you. It’s a lot faster than double-checking it all yourself.

Note For screen reader text detailing the content of the video and a screen reader version of the audio script, click Demo text version.

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Screen Action	Audio Script
A Comparison Profit and Loss worksheet is open in Excel 2003.	If you've worked with complex worksheets, you know that the most impressive-looking worksheets sometimes contain the most embarrassing errors. Fortunately, Excel has lots of tools and tricks to help ensure the accuracy of your data and calculations.
The pointer clicks several cells, stopping at cell B10, Total Net Sales—This Year. An exclamation box appears to the left of the selected cell.	For example, this worksheet contains an error in the formula that calculates the Total Net Sales. I didn’t notice the problem, but Excel found it easily.
The pointer moves to the exclamation box, and a ScreenTip appears: “The formula in this cell refers to a range that has additional numbers adjacent to it.” The pointer clicks the exclamation box, which opens the Formula Omits Adjacent Cells drop-down menu.	It seems that my function is leaving out one of the subtotal cells, which makes the total figure incorrect. Excel automatically found the error and suggests a way to fix it.
The pointer moves over the commands in the Formula Omits Adjacent Cells menu and clicks the Edit in Formula Bar command. The pointer clicks the exclamation box again to reopen the Formula Omits Adjacent Cells menu, and then clicks the Update Formula to Include Cells command. Cell B10, Total Net Sales—This Year, now displays the correct value.	I can get more details about this error by editing it in the formula bar … … or I can simply click the menu to update the worksheet with the corrected formula. Now, that was easy.
The pointer clicks cell E7, which causes another exclamation box to appear. A ScreenTip appears: “The formula in this cell differs from the formulas in this area of the spreadsheet.”	It looks like there’s another error in my worksheet.
The pointer clicks the exclamation box, which opens the Inconsistent Formula drop-down menu, and then clicks the Edit in Formula Bar command.	In this case, Excel is telling me that the formula is inconsistent. When I edit the formula, I can see that the function is not referring to the right cells. I can see the error cell in red.
The pointer moves to cell C6, and then drags the cell reference indicator to cell C7.	To fix the error, I’ll just drag the cell reference indicator to the appropriate cell.
The pointer clicks the Tools menu, and then clicks the Error Checking command. A message appears: “The error check is complete for the entire sheet.”	Problem found? Problem solved, and in less time than it took to watch this video. These were some basic examples, but Excel provides many more functions that help you find and fix errors before you send your worksheet to others.
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