From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

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Excel: Understanding hash errors

Excel: Understanding hash errors

From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

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Excel: Understanding hash errors

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- [Instructor] Hashtags aren't welcome things in Excel. They mean something is amiss and requires your attention. The most common hashtag appears when a value's format is too wide for the cell as shown here in cell B2. This is called an overflow. Your first solution is to widen the column and I'll do so by double-clicking on the border, and yes, it's a wide number, it's a huge value. So an alternative solution is to reformat the number into something smaller. I'll choose the General category and you can see that the number is now displayed with E notation and I can resize the column, better. Now you probably saw that the next cell down retained the hashtags indicating that its format also overflows. In this example, the value formatted is a date. So I'll click on the cell and you can see that the format is a date. But the date of value is incorrect. It's just a big number masquerading as a date so the solution is really…

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