Is there an Excel "missing value" or "NA" symbol?

I am just picking up Excel, but have experience with R and Stata. Does Excel have a missing symbol convention? That is, does Excel have something like R's NA or Stata's .?

For example, I evaluate an IF() statement and want to return a value that will be omitted from later calculations I use "NA". Is this the correct approach in Excel? It seems like I am missing a basic concept, but I can't get Google to give me a better answer.

To make this more concrete, I have a conditional like =IF([@[Div Dummy]]=1,"NA",EOMONTH(A8,0)). Is there a way to get a numeric "missing value" placeholder so that I don't get warnings about conflicted data types?

You're almost there. You can use NA() in your formulas to return that "error" value. It's very useful when charting because it's not charted (unlike 0).

You can leave cells empty and use (if I remember correctly) =isblank() to do the conditional. And it's worth noting that many numerical functions like =sum() and =product() will ignore empty cells, ala sum(x, na.rm=TRUE) in R.

But no, this is one of dozens of reasons why Excel is not a serious tool for statistical data. (Although it's not terrible for simple simulation and optimization problems.)