I have a problem, in Excel.

It started with a simple sheet—just a few formulas doing light duty. Nothing fancy. But one formula had a quirk: when there was no result, it left behind a little dash. Not a zero, not a space. A dash. And that dash broke my logic. I was checking for blank cells, but this wasn’t blank. It looked like nothing, but it was something. So I asked for help—from the three wise wizards of our age: ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini. What they gave me next was… unexpected.

ChatGPT (my first love)

ChatGPT blamed me. "Greg, sounds like that formula is outputting a dash ("-") intentionally when there’s nothing to calculate. That’s likely a fallback built into the formula"

Not what I was looking for. :)

Microsoft Copilot (watered down ChatGPT)

More polite; I'm guessing the audience is older than native ChatGPT, think facebook crowd vs. insta.

"I understand how that can be frustrating! To ensure the cell is truly blank when there's no value to calculate, you can modify your formula to return an empty string ("") instead of a dash."

Gemini (my new love)

Give me an actual answer -- and 3 pages of possible solutions. I'll spare you the 3 pages, but here's the intro: "You're likely encountering the behavior of certain Excel functions (like SUMIF, AVERAGEIF, VLOOKUP, etc.) when their criteria aren't met. Instead of returning a truly blank cell, they sometimes display a dash (-) or a #N/A error, which Excel doesn't consider blank."

Bonus

I also pay for Anthropic's Claude, and I can set it to concise mode (so much better than the default Dicken's mode of AI; Did I mention AI, like a consultant, gets paid per syllable.)

=IF(ISBLANK(your_reference_cell),"",your_original_formula)

Action

Copy and paste your prompt into different tools. And while you are at it, give each tool a role. For example, you are an expert consultant and are asked to enhance and add clarity to this answer -- then paste the prompt and output from the previous tool. Give it a try, and let me know how it works. I'm learning everyday.