There are currently nine IS functions, also known as information functions, in Excel.
This includes ISBLANK, ISERROR, ISTEXT, and more.
But, you might also use the IS functions on their own if it’s beneficial.
Let’s take a look at how they work.
Here are the nine IS functions and brief explanations of each one.
At the same time, you may see a couple that you’ll probably rarely use.
So, let’s look at common uses for a few of the functions.
you could use this with the IF function to display a particular value for blank and non-blank cells.
Here, we have ISBLANK to determine if cell A1 is blank.
The result is True for a blank cell.
You cancopy the same formuladown to check additional cells using the fill handle.
As you see below, we have True for blanks and False for non-blanks.
Now we’ll include the IF function to display a question mark (?)
for a blank cell and a hyphen (-) for a cell containing data.
ISERROR
The ISERROR function is ideal if you want to locateerrors in your sheetfor constantly changing data.
It works well with the IF function in the same way that IFERROR works on its own.
As an example, we’ll use ISERROR to determine if a calculation results in an error.
We’ll divide the value in cell A1 by that in cell B1.
As you’re able to see, we have an error because the result displays True.
The error would be #DIV/0!
because you cannot divide by zero.
Now we can add the IF function to display something other than True or False.
If the calculation results in an error, we’ll display 1, otherwise, we’ll display 2.
As you might see, our result is 1 because the calculation returns an error.
Again, you might use the newer IFERROR function instead of the IF and ISERROR combination in most cases.
These similarly display True if the value is a number or text, respectively.
Here, we want to ensure wehave a number in our cell.
Our result is False because the value in cell A1 is text, not a number.
By using the above formula, we can let the user know they must enter a number.
We can do the same thing with the ISTEXT function.
Here we have our ISTEXT function to see ifthe value is textor not.
These are basic examples of how to use the IS functions in Excel.
