[oak perl] Fwd: Excel Annoyances Needed for New Book

[David Fetter]

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 03:39:51PM -0800, George Woolley wrote:

Top Excel Annoyance:  I can't buy a Linux version :)

Cheers,
D
> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
> 
> Subject: Excel Annoyances Needed for New Book
> Date: Friday 06 February 2004 1:18 pm
> From: Marsee Henon <marsee at oreilly.com>
> To: george at metaart.org
> 
> Hey User Group Leader,
> 
> O'Reilly is pulling together a new book called "Excel Annoyances" and
> we'd like your help! As you might guess from the title, this book aims
> to identify the problems, snarls, quirks, bugs, and just dumb things
> about Excel that drive users nuts. Oh yeah--it also aims to solve these
> annoyances, too.
> 
> If any members of your group use Excel--be they newbies or Excel
> masters--and they have annoyances they'd like to see solved, have them
> email me (marsee at oreilly.com) with "Excel Annoyance" in the subject
> line. Just have them note what version of Excel and Windows (or Mac
> OS) they're using.
> 
> Thanks for sharing. We'll make sure to get copies of "Excel
> Annoyances" sent to your group shortly after publication.
> 
> 
> --Marsee
> 
> 
> ***
> An example:
> 
> LET ME COUNT THE DAYS
> 
> THE ANNOYANCE: I know you can do date calculations in Excel, whether it's
> to find how many days late I am on a car payment or to see how long it's
> been since my last haircut. It's pretty easy to determine the number of
> days between two dates; just subtract one from the other. But when I do
> that, the result is another date! Huh?
> 
> THE FIX: In a blank worksheet, try this little exercise, which should
> show your age in days:
> 
> 1. In cell A1, enter your birth date in MM/DD/YYYY format.
> 
> 2. In cell B1, enter the formula =today() to display the current date.
> 
> 3. In cell C1, enter the formula =b1-a1.
> 
> You'll notice that the result of the formula in C1 is some other date,
> which appears to have no correlation to either of the first dates. How
> come? When you enter a formula, Excel matches the formatting of the
> formula's inputs. This works well when you're doing calculations on
> dollar amounts or percentages; the result comes out formatted just
> the way you'd want. But in our example, Excel formatted the formula
> result--a number of days--as a date.
> 
> ***
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Oakland mailing list
> Oakland at mail.pm.org
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/oakland

-- 
David Fetter david at fetter.org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 510 893 6100    cell: +1 415 235 3778