Return empty cell from formula in Excel

Question

I need an Excel formula to return an empty cell, however it seems that Excel treats a reference to an empty cell or an empty string differently from an actual empty cell. In essence, I require something like:

=IF(some_condition,EMPTY(),some_value)

I tried to do things such as

=IF(some_condition,"",some_value)

and

=IF(some_condition,,some_value)

and assuming B1 is an empty cell

=IF(some_condition,B1,some_value)

I assume they are the outcome of a formula, but none of these seem to be genuine empty cells. Is it possible to maintain a cell genuinely empty and only fill it with data if and when a certain condition is met?

Answer 1

There is no way to do this in Excel. In Excel, a formula's output can only be a number, text, logical (boolean), or error value. There is no "empty" or "blank" value type for a formula cell.

However, there is a significant difference in how other functions regard NA() (SUM(NA()) is #N/A while SUM(A1) is 0 if A1 is empty), so using NA() and ISNA() may or may not actually fix the problem.