Click File tab, and click Options. If you want to hide the comment indicators in Excel, you can hide the comment indicators with the following steps: 1. By default, when you insert the comments in excel, it will only display the comment indicators in cells. There is a lot of confusion about plotting of hidden and empty cells, about what constitutes a blank cell, and about various workarounds that purport to produce blank cells that will or will not be displayed in a chart.Show or hide both comments and comment indicators with Excel Options. If you want to hide a certain.A common problem around web forums and blogs is how to plot blank cells in Excel charts. When it comes to tables, there’s hardly anything you can’t do.Excel’s Hidden and Empty Cell Settings DialogYou can easily tell Excel how to plot empty cells in a chart. Tl drA new feature in Excel 2016, Show #N/A As An Empty Cell, solves the pain and frustration experienced by generations of Excel users trying to avoid plotting what look like apparently blank cells. REPLACE.I discuss the “plot blank cells” issue in several tutorials in this blog: Mind the Gap – Charting Empty Cells, Area Chart With Gap, Another approach to plotting gaps in Excel charts, and VBA Approaches to Plotting Gaps in Excel Charts, among others.
Finding Hidden Cells In Excel How To Plot BlankWhat’s a “Blank Cell”, Anyway?Part of the confusion over this whole issue is what Excel considers a blank cell.People will type a space character in a cell and wonder why that’s not blank, it looks blank. By default Excel will not chart data in rows or columns which have been hidden, but checking this box causes hidden cells to be plotted.I’ll explain what the Empty Cells settings mean below, including some of their idiosyncrasies. There are three options for Show Empty Cells As: Gaps, Zero, and Connect Data Points with Line.There is also an option to Show Data in Hidden Rows and Columns. The Hidden and Empty Cell Settings dialog appears. Click on Hidden and Empty Cells in the bottom left of the Select Data Source dialog that appears. So is it a blank, or isn’t it? Well, a chart plots it as zero, so for my money, it’s not a blank at all.The fact is, there is no magic function in Excel, no BLANK() or NULL(), which would cause a cell to behave consistently as a blank cell. For example, if cell A1 contains “”, ISBLANK(A1) is FALSE, but COUNTBLANK(A1) is 1. As above, it’s a piece of text.But this is all confusing, because different Excel functions treat “” differently. But it returns “”, why isn’t that blank? Because “” is a piece of text, albeit zero characters long.Sometimes a null string (i.e., “” without the quotes) gets imported into a cell, and people don’t see anything, so they wonder about that too. The answer is, because the cell contains a formula. People also avoid this approach because they think the #N/A value in a cell is ugly, even though it is informative. However, this is of limited use, since it doesn’t really mimic the behavior of a blank cell, and it works differently for different chart types. For example, =IF(A1>0,A1,NA()) instead of =IF(A1>0,A1,""), where the function NA() displays #N/A in a cell. Cloud vpn for mac free downloadThe middle time it is actually a blank cell, which the first and third time it links to the original. Other WorkaroundsThere are numerous other ways to get around the inability to plot a formula as a blank cell.In Another approach to plotting gaps in Excel charts (on this blog), Roberto Mensa, Kris Szabó, and Gábor Madác of the FrankensTeam showed an elegant and sometimes fragile technique that used defined range names that would substitute a blank cell for any cell containing #N/A.In the comments to another post on my blog, which I cannot now locate, another reader suggested creating a range that linked multiple times to each value in the original range, so each point appears three times. I also believe that when these changes were implemented, some inconsistencies crept into this behavior. However, =IF(A1>0,A1,"#N/A") returns a text label “#N/A”, which as text is left aligned in a cell, and will be plotted like any text, as a zero value.This is the behavior which has changed in very recent versions of Excel 2016. =IF(A1>0,A1,NA()) and =IF(A1>0,A1,#N/A) both return the error value #N/A, which as an error is centered in a cell with General Horizontal Alignment (see my post Check Your Data: Is It Numeric or Text to learn why General Horizontal Alignment is important). I was asking for a general function that would make any Excel formulas or charts treat a given cell as a blank cell, but my main interest was in the ability to chart the result of a function as a blank cell.When the feature was first introduced to a subset of Insiders, there was no option #N/A was always treated like a blank cell in a chart. I’d like to think it was partly in response to my suggestion on Excel UserVoice, Give us a proper NULL() worksheet function. The new feature was announced on the Microsoft Office blog in Display empty cells, null (#N/A) values, and hidden worksheet data in a chart. Plot Blank Cells in Common Excel Chart TypesHere is how a blank cell is plotted in a line chart, for all three options. On my non-Office-365 laptop, I get the new behavior, but I still do not have the new dialog, so I can’t toggle it on and off.Now let’s see how this plays out in Excel charts. On my Office 365 laptop I have the full-blown Show #N/A As An Empty Cell behavior. This space was cleared in Excel 2013, but only utilized recently.This new feature has been rolled out not only to Office 365 subscribers, but also to regular Excel 2016 users. Insiders were also treated to a new Hidden and Empty Cell Settings dialog, which features a checkbox to Show #N/A as an empty cell.Notice that there is a space in the old dialog where the new checkbox appears. Perfect.Here is how Excel plots a blank cell in a column chart. Left, for Show empty cells as: Gap, there is a gap in the blank cell’s position. Right, for Connect data points with line, there is a line connecting the points on either side of the blank cell. Center, for Show empty cells as: Zero, there is an actual data point (a marker and a data label) with a value of zero in the blank cell’s position. The tick label at Y=0 is colored red to draw attention to the altered axis settings.The bars start at the axis (at Y=-2, not at Y=0), and extend upward to the Y value. Since the interpolate option is disabled, Excel defaults to leaving a gap.I’ve modified the column charts by extending the Y axis minimum to -2, and setting the Horizontal Axis Crosses property to -2. You can still have that option in a column chart, though for example if you start with a line chart with that option selected and then change the chart type, or if you apply the option with VBA. Right, since it makes no sense to connect points with a line if the points are columns or bars, the Connect data points with line option (also known as the Interpolate option) is disabled I’ve denoted this by using gray italic text in the chart title. You can clearly see that there is a data point at zero corresponding to the blank cell in the Y values.I’ll illustrate the problem in one set of line charts. The interpolate option is disabled, so Excel defaults to plotting a zero-value point, not leaving a gap as in the column chart.As I did with the column charts above, I’ve modified the area charts by extending the Y axis minimum to -2, and setting the Horizontal Axis Crosses property to -2 (note the red label at Y=0). You can still have that option in an area chart, the same as you can in a column chart. Right, Excel decides it makes no sense to connect points with a line (though it might have made sense to fill in the area as if there were a line), the Connect data points with line option (the Interpolate option) is disabled. Center, for Show empty cells as: Zero, there is an actual data point (or at least a data label) with a value of zero in the blank cell’s position.
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