What’s 1-2?<\/p>\n
Today, MS Excel tells me it’s +39815. (Tomorrow it will tell me something different.)<\/p>\n
Some while back a signup sheet went around the office for our annual lamb roast. Since every problem (nail) in an office environment has a preinstalled office-suite hammer, the signup list was an Excel spreadsheet. Once everyone has entered their number of guests, it totals up how many total guests. Here’s what I sent around before figuring out Excel’s flavor of crack.<\/p>\n
\nSay you don’t know exactly how many guests you will have for the BBQ. Type a range (e.g. “1-2”) in and see what Excel computes for the total numbers of guests\/folks.<\/p>\n
For “1-2” guests by my name I get exactly 39084 total guests. Fixed by just saying “1”, but now I’m curious. How is it computing this number?<\/p>\n
I can see that being parsed as “one minus two” and yielding a negative number of guests, but I can’t figure out what particular flavor of crack Excel is smoking to get 39,084. Anyone?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I mean, if it had returned NaN or +32767 (or some other signed-unsigned integer conversion failure), I might have understood.<\/p>\n
An Excel guru eventually figured it out: The field was hard-set as a numeric field (no auto). Still, it parsed the expression, not as “one minus two” but as a date – “February 1, current year”, and since it was a numeric field, represented this numerically the best way it knew how: the number of days since January 1st, 1900.<\/p>\n
The flavor is strawberry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What’s 1-2? Today, MS Excel tells me it’s +39815. (Tomorrow it will tell me something different.) Some while back a signup sheet went around the office for our annual lamb roast. Since every problem (nail) in an office environment has a preinstalled office-suite hammer, the signup list was an Excel spreadsheet. Once everyone has entered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","iawp_total_views":12,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[86,85],"class_list":["post-565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-crack","tag-excel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=565"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":568,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions\/568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}