If I’m not mistaken, Lotus used @ instead of =.
To avoid the dash being misconstrued as a minus, just throw a ’ (single quote sign… can’t remember real name of that symbol…) in front of it.
So: '- Blah blah blah
That’ll show up as a dash only. Works for any function you don’t want displayed as the function.
Apostrophe?
I’ve been told Lotus used + instead of = by one of my first bosses in finance. I assumed it to be true
Yeah… I can’t believe I didn’t Google this one first.
It didn’t rotate my display, it turned off both my monitors, costing me an hour or so of unsaved work…
I just looked up Excel 2013 because of this thread. Watched a youtube video on the changes in graphing. I want Excel 2013 for Christmas now
Possibly, maybe it was a different one, Quattro or whatever. There was definitely a common platform in the past that used just + and - instead of =. Over time the = standard evolved.
Bump.
Is there a way to “sticky” the = sign when putting a formula that’s not yet a formula?
When I’m working, sometimes I need to add multiple numbers together, but I don’t know them yet. For example, I’m going through a customer’s bank statements, and I know I need to put all of January’s utilities in one cell. I know there will be multiple bills.
So when I see a water bill for $50, I go to the cell, and put “+50”, knowing full well that there’s trash, gas, electricity, etc. still to follow.
Then, I see an electric bill for $175. I go back the the cell and press F2, and put “+175”. Now I have “50+175” in text in the box, not a formula. Excel, in its infinite wisdom, deleted my + sign to make it a formula.
Anybody know how to fix this?
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You must open a separate insance of Excel if you want to have it open on 2 monitors.
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VBA often doesn’t work on Excel clones (i.e. Openoffice)
Put an apostrophe first so it’s recognized as text.
Are they labeled the same way? I imagine if all the bank statements are from the same area, there will be only so many water companies. You could build a sumif template (or vba) to find and pull out the various utilities automatically – then you spot check for anything else that needs to be included.
=+50 should do the trick
So instead of just putting +50, if you put =+50, then the formula will “stick”?
^Well, I’ll be damned. I tried it and it worked!
(++50 works too.)
Use “=” instead of “+”.
Edit: Why do older people use “+” at the beginning of a formula instead of “=”? My dad does that too. Btw, you don’t actually need “=+50” or “++50”…"=50" should suffice.
Well, I’ll be damned. Just using a simple = works too.
And I like to use + because + is easier than =.
Shall I say, + > = ?
I teach a lot of excel in my advanced class, and debugging and grading their spreadsheets can be a real hemmorhoid. The biggest help was making them use name ranges - and I’d ding them if the names weren’t almost self-explanatory. And I’d ding them 2x if they hard-coded things.
I told them that other people are going to have to read their shite, and not making their work easy to debug pissed people off for no good reason.
You can also do
=" - Blah blah blah"
I set up a lot of excel documents so that the text is based on a formula so something like
="Report as of "&TEXT(Date,“MMM YY”)
where Date might be some named range. Change Date once and that will update all charts and tables in the whole document. Saves me a lot of time.
I need to start using named ranges.
How do named ranges make anything easier? Whenever I’m trying to debug someone’s model, named ranges make it more difficult.
For example, their formula will say something like “Revenue-COGS” and then I’ll have to figure out if they named their range correctly, which is always a pain. If it’s just the cell references, I can easily see where they wen’t wrong.
I must be doing something wrong, no?
Maybe we should all just start using slate (useslate.com)