Sum Function Troubleshooting

[Alessandra Flanagan]

Hello! I've used the Sum function many times to quickly calculate the sum of a bunch of cells and I'm currently trying to do that for my finance spreadsheet.

Problem is when I add up the cells (ex: =Sum(C3, C10, C29)) the total comes out to be $0.00 everytime no matter what I do. Is this happening for a certain reason? I have the entire column set to currency if that makes a difference.

Please help!

[#2]

Hi Alessandra,

How cells in your finance spreadsheet are formatted? If, for example, you enter manually in C3 the $10 you have the text string here. If you enter just 10 and after that format the cell as the currency that will be correct number for 10 bucks.

And SUM ignores text if it is in cells you sum, e.g SUM("$10", 2, "$5") = 0+2+0=2

[#3]

I have a similar problem . This is my formula:

=SUM(AV5:AV265)

the column includes some numbers, some blanks, and some zeros.  Many numbers come from somewhere else, so the cell will actually say, e.g., "=AB47" or something like that.

I have tried summing some of the subsections, since this span is 200 cells long. SOME subsections will sum, others will yield zero.  I can't tell a diff between sections that work and those that don't

[#4]

Hi Mary,

It doesn't matter do you have formulas inside or not, important are some of your cells contain text instead of numbers or not. For example, do you have text "$3" or number 3 formatted as USD.

To check you may compare

=COUNTA(AV5:AV265)
and
=COUNT(AV5:AV265)

if they are not equal that means you have some cells with text within the range.

You may also empty column starting from row 5 enter

=ISTEXT(AV5)

and frag it down. If returns TRUE you have the text here.

for the SUM any text, blank or zero adds zero to the  total.