Dividing one column by another

Question

I am rather new to spreadsheets, and I feel like what I want to accomplish is rather simple, but I am having enormous difficulty finding anyone else doing something similar.

I have values in column A and B, and I want to divide A2 by B2, A3 by B3, etc. and output to column C. Putting this in C2 DOES work:

=ARRAYFORMULA(A2:A/B2:B)

But the rest of column C all the way down displays #DIV/0!. A little research uncovered the IFERROR function. Perfect! So I tried:

=IFERROR(ARRAYFORMULA(A2:A/B2:B))

But this does not change the output. Still #DIV/0! all the way home. Am I using IFERROR wrong? Is there a way to select on the cells that have values? Is there another solution?

Answer 1

Use this formula instead.

Formula

=ARRAYFORMULA(IFERROR(A2:A/B2:B))

Note

Error catching has to take place inside the ARRAYFORMULA

Answer 2

Just for completeness:

In C2 you can write:

=A2/B2

then copy the cell (CTRL-C) and paste it (CTRL-V) to the whole column where you want the result to be visible. This will procude the same result as ARRAYFORMULA() and is in general more effort, but allows you to select the rows where you want to have the result.

Alternatively you can also provide the last row you want to calculate over to arrayformula.

=ARRAYFORMULA(A2:A27/B2:B27)

This would only print in lines 2-27.

Answer 3

Dividing one column by another

I like to keep it simple. Here is what worked for me.

In cell C2, I used the formula : ¹

=IFERROR(A2/B2)

Then – after clicking the C2 cell – I grabbed the small blue square in the bottom right corner of the cell and dragged it down the whole column. ²

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Is there another solution?

– When I tried this solution, it first seemed to work. But when I tried using the same formula in all cells of the column, I got a #REF! error similar to what is reported here.

References

• Suggested solution on how to divide two columns
• Question that reports the #REF! error

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¹ Please replace the column letters with whatever suits your case.

² I didn't see any reason to use ARRAYFORMULA.