6. Excel Tips - Debugging large Excel Function calls

Nick's picture

So you've inherited a really large spreadsheet from some plonker who never liked, but has now left the company without leaving any documentation.

The spreadsheet is now broken and you have been tasked to fix it. There are massive functions:

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Where do you start?!

Well fortunately help is at hand.

Step1:
Go: Insert=>function (click on the offending cell, and go: ALT then I then F)

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Step2:
Well, there's nothing particularly new there, but here's the cunning part.
You can now drill into the function call to debug it by going into the formula bar and clicking on one of the imbedded functions, like so:

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Aha.. now you can see more.

Step3:
It gets better.. You can drill down even further to the most imbed function, and work backwards.

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There are more ways to debug large function calls, and I will go over these in later "Tip of the day" posts.

Nick

Training Video on Debugging a large function call: