Does too many IF functions overload the spreadsheet ?

[Aitch]

I'm working on an old spreadsheet that somebody else put together - they used "" in place of zero which means whenever the "" is used in a calculation, I end up with an error!

I thought an easy fix would be to use an IF function to replace the "" with a zero as in IF(A1="",0,A1)

However, this needs to be copied over to thousands of cells...

Will the addition of this many IF functions make the whole sheet sluggish to work with... or will it barely make any difference at all?

Thanks for any advice!

 

[jasonb75]

Maybe find and replace "" with 0 instead?
I suspect that an incorrectly written calculation is more the problem though. Using "" is normal practice and most people use it without problems.

 

[Aitch]

Replacing was my original thought - but it seems to break the formulas... which I was hoping to avoid redoing lol

Is there any way to get Excel to view all "" as zero?

 

[jasonb75]

Without seeing some examples of the formulas there is no correct answer to this, there is rarely a 'one fits all' method even for what you might think is a very simple task.