Out, out, green triangles.

Q. Some cells in my spreadsheets contain little green triangles in the upper left-hand corner (see screenshot at right), and I can't get rid of them, though sometimes--through no apparent effort on my part--they just disappear. Is my software infected with the dreaded green triangle virus?

A. No, it's not a virus. Those green triangles are Excel's way of telling you it believes the cells contain an error. Of course, sometimes Excel is wrong, but such error-flagging is a handy fail-safe function.

Why it happens: Excel 2002 and 2003 constantly work in the background scanning for possible errors. You can turn off the feature by clicking on Tools, Options and the Error Checking tab and unchecking the Enable background error checking. Then click on OK.

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STANLEY ZAROWIN, a former JofA senior editor, is now a contributing editor to the magazine. His e-mail address is [e-mail].