Sometimes the formulae get bigger and bigger and they eventually become so complex that they become a pain. You can use an not very well known function in Excel library to comment parts of your formulae so that they become somewhat readable.



The function is N("text"). It takes one argument and if the argument is a text value then it returns 0. If you add 0 to any formula you don't change the value of that formula. Using this trick you can add any comment to the argument of this function and add it to your formula like shown below:


=VLOOKUP(B3,'C:\Users\ZZZ\Desktop\ZZZ\[Application Object.xls]Sheet1'!$D$16:$G$24,2,0)  + N("Looking up value of headcount for Aug from headcount file.")

It is a long formula and we are sure to forget what we were doing 6 months down the line, so we add to it a comment using the N() function. Since it returns a 0 i doesn't affect our headcount number in any way.

It works when the formula returns a number, but be careful with formulae that return text values. So in the above formula, if it returned a text the +N() part would have returned an error.