formula to return nothing

[jomili]

I have lots of workbooks with columns of formulas that depend on each other. I want to keep them neat, so I use a lot of IF-type formulas, like so in column B:

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This looks good, because if the condition isn't satisified, the cell appears empty. But, if in column C, I have a formula adding A and B, if the result of B is "", I get an N/A in column C, because Excel is recognizing that Something is in B, and it's not a number. A workaround for that is to have my IF formula return a Zero, but I often don't want a zero, either. Sure, I can do stuff with conditional formatting to hide the zeros, but what I'd like instead is to have the formula return nothing. How can I do that?

[K m]

You could always do this:

Assume
A1=IF(A2 = 3,A2,"")

=IF(A1="","",A1+B1)

[ChemistB]

A formula always returns something. Instead of adding, you can use SUM which won't give you that error, you could have it return 0 and then format the cell so that it doesn't show zeros.

[kbkumar]

Hello - I also encounter similar situations and the way I resolve this is by using 0 in the If formula and using the custom format [0;-0;;@] for the entire data range (being mindful of any %, currency values etc.) this format of number does not display 0's, the data looks clean and is usable for further analysis.

Hope this helps.

[jomili]

Sounds like I'm pretty much just going to have to return the zero and format it away, aren't I? Except that Km has posted a possible way around. Are there others?