Return empty cell from formula in Excel

Question

I need to return an empty cell from an Excel formula, but it appears that excel treats an empty string or a reference to an empty cell differently than a true empty cell. So essentially I want need something like

=IF(some_condition,EMPTY(),some_value)

I tried to do things such as

=IF(some_condition,"",some_value)

and

=IF(some_condition,,some_value)

and assuming B1 is an empty cell

=IF(some_condition,B1,some_value)

but none of these appear to be true empty cells, I'm guessing because they are the result of a formula. Is there any way to populate a cell if and only if some condition is met and otherwise keep the cell truly empty?

EDIT: as recommended I tried to return NA(), but for my purposes this did not work either. Is there a way to do this with VB?

EDIT: I am building a worksheet which pulls in data from other worksheets that is formatted to the very specific demands of an application which imports the data into a database. I do not have access to change the implementation of this application, and it fails if the value is "" instead of actually empty.

Answer 1

Try using the BLANK() worksheet function.

Answer 2

=IF(ISBLANK(A1),"Blank",A1)

Answer 3

Excel does not have any way to do this.

The result of a formula in a cell in Excel must be a number, text, logical (boolean) or error. There is no formula cell value type of "empty" or "blank".

One practice that I have seen followed is to use NA() and ISNA(), but that may or may not really solve your issue since there is a big differrence in the way NA() is treated by other functions (SUM(NA()) is #N/A while SUM(A1) is 0 if A1 is empty).

Answer 4

You're going to have to use VB, then. You'll iterate over the cells in your range, test the condition, and delete the contents if they match. Something like:

For Each cell in SomeRange
  if (cell.value = SomeTest) then cell.clearcontents

end

Answer 5

Try evaluating the cell using LEN. If it contains a formula LEN will return 0. If it contains text it will return greater than 0.

Answer 6

You can achieve what you want with a space between the speech marks. If the condition is true, it returns a space, which makes the cell appear empty, otherwise it return the FALSE value.

=IF(some_condition," ",some_value)

This worked for me!