Excel formula to return earliest date in a range & ignores blank cells

Question

I was able to use the MIN function to return earliest date in a range, but I also found that it returns a default excel date (12/30/1899) when the range of cells are empty. Is there another way to avoid the default date for blank cells and return blank?

For example: Range 1 7/1/2014 7/2/2014 6/30/2014

Result = 6/30/2014

Range 2 (cells are blank because they're still waiting for input) ... ... ...

Result = 12/30/1899

Answer 1

这应该工作

=If(Min(A:A) > 0, Min(A:A), "")

Answer 2

Another formula approach would be to use SMALL rather than MIN - SMALL will return an error if there are no dates in the range (rather than zero) so you can clean the error up with IFERROR , eg

=IFERROR(SMALL(A1:A100,1),"")

....or you can retain your current formula with a simple MIN and just custom format the result field so that zeroes don't display, eg custom format as

mm/dd/yyyy;;

Note the two semi-colons - those must be included