Divide by Zero Display Values

Question

What is the best way (most intuitive to users) or best practice for displaying the results of a divide by 0 error when doing reporting? Within the report, I capture this error, however, when displaying it on a human readable report; I am not sure how to note this.

An example would be something like Weight / Revenue ratio. For a given terminal, on a given day, there may have been no revenue, but some shipments (which would have weight) may have been shipped.

The current reports that I am looking at, handle this by placing a 0 in the column, however, this could be misleading, as this is not technically true.

Another thought would be to leave it blank; however, it would be unknown to the user why the field was left blank.

I also considered the standard Excel error, #DIV/0! however, this tends to make the report looked clutter.

I am curious what others have done in the past for this situation.

Answer 1

If clutter is a concern, how about an error symbol instead? If color is available, a red "X" could work. If usually black and white, perhaps an "E". Include a legend in the header and footer to indicate what the symbol symbolizes.

Answer 2

On ours, we use either a blank space or "NaN" (for Not a Number) and sometimes an asterisk "*" depending on what the end user prefers. (We give them a choice in the planning stage.)

Answer 3

Other options you might like to consider are
N/A - not applicable N/R - no result NRP - no result possible and similar, assuming that your target audience are not programmers.

You should only have to explain the meaning of N/A to each user 5 or 6 times before they start to remember it.

Answer 4

I've used a single "-" in the past, especially when doing excel work. From a best practices point of view I think "0*" with a *This division has no revenue" note at the bottom.

Answer 5

E/0 or Err/0 .............

Answer 6

We've got two different policies for that sort of case, depending of the context. Either "N/A" or "Error".

Answer 7

The best practice depends on what the divide by zero means in context.

The purpose of any report is communication. To the business side, nothing is communicated by NaN, or #DIV/0. They need to know what's actually happening.

If there's a legitimate reason for the value to be zero, it means the calculated metric is irrelevant. You point out that sometimes, revenue is legitimately zero, and it's reasonable to show something like N/A (which, by the way, should be familiar to just about everyone on the business side - it's a very common abbreviation).

However, if there's no legitimate reason, then it's an error, and should either be shown as such or excluded altogether. In your situation, weight also might be zero, but let's pretend it's not - that a weight of zero means there's an error in the source data. In that situation, your choice is either to drop that item(day,whatever) altogether from the report, or or show it with something which marks it as an error (like "Error").