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Excel: how to indicate if a cell is blank

How to return a value if a cell is blank in Excel? What is the ISBLANK formula? We got it all covered: check our video! Plenty of examples to learn from in our article, indicating if a cell is empty or not in Excel.

When working on Excel tables with a lot of data, you might skip some cells by inadvertence. Then, how to return a value when a cell is blank in your worksheet?

Check if your table contains blank cells with the ISBLANK function!

You can use this handy function for conditional formatting or combined with VLOOKUP. To learn how, check the video on the right now!

Of course, you can combine ISBLANK with other Excel functions like IF or SEARCH.

To check if a cell is blank in Excel, use the ISBLANK function. Its syntax is really simple, it’s =ISBLANK(value), with value being the value you want to test. This can be an empty cell, a text, a result, an array, etc.

The result will be TRUE or FALSE.

TRUE – Yes, the value (cell) is blank.
FALSE – No, the cell is not blank.

To indicate if a cell is blank, enter =BLANK(cell) somewhere on your worksheet, with cell being the cell you want to check.

The result of the formula will indicate if a cell is blank or not.

In this example, we want to check if the cell B2 is empty or not. The formula we use for ISBLANK is =ISBLANK(B2).

The result is TRUE: B2 is empty.

In this example, we want to check if some cells in column B are empty. We don’t want to check each cell one by one so we will enter an array as value in the formula =ISBLANK(value).

Indeed, 3 results are TRUE so 3 cells are empty.

Now, you know how to check and indicate in Excel if a cell is blank or not.

Learn more tips and formulas by reading our blog!