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"Oh My God" Excel formulas not working in my report. Sounds familiar right? If so, don't worry, you are just one among many Excel users who face this problem very often.

To avoid all this hassle, we have written this in-depth article covering most of the reasons for Excel formulas not working. And how to fix them.

10 reasons for Excel errors:

• Calculation options.
• Excel formula not calculating, just showing formula.
• Extra space(s) is an extra headache.
• Get rid of nonprintable/hidden characters.
• Excel formatting – don't try to compare apples with oranges.
• Circular references.
• Using double quotes incorrectly.
• BODMAS - basic rule for every calculation.
• Incorrect use of "absolute" referencing.
• Incorrect formula arguments.

Solver Max, a sister company of iⁿ, provides a collection of optimization model examples using the Solver and OpenSolver add-ins.

Models include:

• Facility location. Where should we locate our facility to maximize profit?
• Job sequencing. What is the best sequence for the jobs that we need to complete?
• Wire cutting. What is the best way to cut our stock material to minimize waste?
• Fantasy sports. How can we select an optimal team for a fantasy sports competition?
• Production mix. What mix of products should we make to maximize profit?

The BBC reports that a "badly thought-out use of Microsoft's Excel software was the reason nearly 16,000 coronavirus cases went unreported in England."

Although Excel has been the target of much blame, and even contempt, the issue is much deeper than that.

As two authors from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) point out, the issue isn't Excel as such, but rather the way that we use Excel:

• Nightmare on spreadsheet: take Excel use seriously
• The greatest spreadsheet error of them all – treating Excel with utter contempt

If you work with formulas in Excel, sooner or later you will encounter the problem where Excel formulas don't work at all (or give the wrong result).

In this article, I will highlight those common issues that are likely the cause of your Excel formulas not working.

This tutorial covers:

• Incorrect syntax of the function.
• Extra spaces causing unexpected results.
• Using manual calculation instead of automatic.
• Deleting rows/column/cells leading to #REF! error.
• Incorrect placement of parenthesis (BODMAS).
• Incorrect use of absolute/relative cell references.
• Incorrect reference to sheet / workbook names.
• Circular references.
• Cells formatted as text.
• Text automatically getting converted into dates.
• Hidden rows/columns can give unexpected results.

Modelers across the globe are beginning to recognise financial modeling as a profession.

Despite strong support for professional standards many modeling teams do not implement them rigorously and a suprising number of teams do not have consistent quality control systems in place.

Key conclusions from "2019 Financial Modeling Profession Survey":

• 84% of modelers agree that financial modeling is a dynamic and innovative profession.
• Errors in models remain common. 47% of respondents reported errors that were not picked up by internal review processes.
• Most financial modelers are self-trained and rarely attend formal financial modeling training courses.

Introducing XLOOKUP, a replacement for VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP.

The main benefits of XLOOKUP:

• Can find the last match!
• Can look to the left!
• Defaults to an exact match (unlike VLOOKUP which defaults to True for the 4th argument).
• Defaults to not support wildcards, but you can explicitly allow wildcards if you want them.
• Has all the speed improvements released to VLOOKUP in 2018.
• No longer relies on Column Number, so it won't break if someone inserts a column in the middle of the lookup table.
• Performance improvement because you are only specifying two columns instead of the whole lookup table.
• XLOOKUP returns a range instead of VLOOKUP returning a value.

One of the cardinal rules of Excel is don't key-in a value into a formula if that value could change.

Tracking the value down could be problematic if you need to change the value. Tables can be the solution to avoiding keyed-in values.

Often when building even a simple financial model, unit conversion is necessary.

For example, you sell 437,911 widgets at £12.50 each. However, in your output summary sheet for senior management, do you really wish to show that the revenue earned is £5,473,888 or is it more likely that you will display this figure as £5.5m?

Most modellers will modify their number with a calculation such as =437911*12.50/1000000. But using this approach poses the danger of making a mistake in your additions by adding £ and £millions.

By using a custom number format, rather than modifying values, you will never again add or subtract numbers of different orders of magnitude.