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Sunday, July 08, 2012

A Small Victory Over Microsoft Excel

One of my complaints about Excel is that scientific notation doesn't appear in its formulas. So if you want to convert (say) Watts to terawatts, and type a formula like

=A1/1e12

Excel automatically converts this and you end up with formulas like

=A1/1000000000000

which is hard to proofread. This only took me a decade and a half to realize, but if you write the formula as

=A1/10^12

the problem is solved.

I guess you take your victories where you can get them.

Added: To clarify, I mean how the formula appears in the formula bar, not how the result in the cell is formatted.


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2 comments:

  1. thefordprefect6:19 PM

    A good cell format
    (enter into custom formats)
    ##0.0E+0

    This will give you engineering format:
    1.0E+0
    10.0E+0
    100.0E+0
    1.0E+3
    10.0E+3
    100.0E+3
    1.0E+6

    ReplyDelete
  2. David Appell8:23 PM

    Thanks, but my issue isn't with how the number in the cell appears to the viewer, but how the formula appears in the formula bar. I should have made that clearer.

    ReplyDelete