Divide by Zero Display Values

Question

What is the best way (most intuitive to users) or best practice for displaying the results of a divide by 0 error when doing reporting? Within the report, I capture this error, however, when displaying it on a human readable report; I am not sure how to note this.

An example would be something like Weight / Revenue ratio. For a given terminal, on a given day, there may have been no revenue, but some shipments (which would have weight) may have been shipped.

The current reports that I am looking at, handle this by placing a 0 in the column, however, this could be misleading, as this is not technically true.

Another thought would be to leave it blank; however, it would be unknown to the user why the field was left blank.

I also considered the standard Excel error, #DIV/0! however, this tends to make the report looked clutter.

I am curious what others have done in the past for this situation.

Answer 1

On ours, we use either a blank space or "NaN" (for Not a Number) and sometimes an asterisk "*" depending on what the end user prefers. (We give them a choice in the planning stage.)

Answer 2

I've used a single "-" in the past, especially when doing excel work. From a best practices point of view I think "0*" with a *This division has no revenue" note at the bottom.