Let’s say you have 600 rows of data and you’re looking at a final number from column W telling you that you are owed a total of $17,384. Can you trust it?
Suggestion: Create a formula that looks for any cells in column W that show the error: #NA.
=COUNTIF(W:W, “#NA“)
Maybe we see that we’re owed $17,384 and COUNTIF says that 6 cells are showing #NA. Those 6 cells have to be reconciled before you start calling in those debts! Maybe there is no debt to collect but someone’s sloppy cut-&-paste caused 6 formulae to error-out.
Data Integrity is a critical layer in spreadsheet development. Imagine the fuss that could be (and often is) created because of corrupt data. Being in the habit of checking for errors is one way to ensure that you can trust your data.
