Written and reviewed by FormulaCraft Team. Each formula on this page is run through our verification engine before publishing.
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ISBLANK
ISBLANK returns TRUE only when a cell contains nothing at all — no value, no formula, not even a space. A cell that holds a formula returning "" is NOT blank to ISBLANK, which is the most common source of confusion. Use ISBLANK to flag truly missing data, gate IF logic against blank inputs, or feed conditional formatting. For a looser definition of empty that also catches blank strings, use =A2="" or =LEN(A2)=0 instead.
Excel
=ISBLANK(A2)Google Sheets
=ISBLANK(A2)✓
Verified example
Computed by a real spreadsheet engine on the sample data below.
| Name | IsBlank? |
| Alice | FALSE |
| TRUE | |
| Bob | FALSE |
=ISBLANK(A2)→FALSE
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How it works
- 1Point ISBLANK at the cell you want to check, e.g. =ISBLANK(A2).
- 2It returns TRUE if A2 is truly empty (untouched, no formula, no space) and FALSE for any other content.
- 3Combine with IF to display a fallback when blank: =IF(ISBLANK(A2),"Missing",A2).
- 4To treat a formula returning "" as blank too, use =A2="" instead — ISBLANK will return FALSE for that cell because the formula itself counts as content.
- 5Count blank cells in a range with COUNTBLANK: =COUNTBLANK(A2:A100). This counts cells with "" as blank, unlike ISBLANK.