BIMDAS - Order of Calculation
in [General]
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From: Atreides on 22 Feb 2005 21:11 Yes, obviously I should have been more careful transferring Mathematica formuals into Excel. I though that changing the Mma output into "Input Form" would have been safe enough - obviously not. Otherwise one must enter the formulas by hand - not a fun task. I nice trick I've discovered is to make the cell-reference substitutions in Mathematica (e.g. a -> G3, b -> G4...). This avoids doing it by hand as well.
From: Myrna Larson on 22 Feb 2005 21:14 Who would would possibly know why they did it this way? What's the point of wasting time speculating about WHY? You have a problem to solve. I would think your time would be better spent on that aspect. Fundamentally, you need to add parentheses to an expression like -X^2 so it becomes -(X^2). It is VERY unlikely this will be changed. It could "break" existing spreadsheet formulas that have been written to accommodate Excel's calculation order. "Atreides" <atreides1AThotmailD0Tcom> wrote in message news:3D9F798F-E87A-4EE9-965A-6643085AE636(a)microsoft.com... >> Why? Because that's the way they wrote it. > > Why is the sky blue? Because. ;) > > I was hoping for something more informative than this. e.g. > 1. This convention was considered more intuitive to the majority of > expected > users. > 2. Computer programmers live in their own world and have their own > conventions. > 3. Other... > >> And no, there's no way to change this. > > Perhaps this should be included in the next version of Excel. Some other > options can be changed with regards to the calculations (by going to > "Tools", > "Options", "Calculation"). This would be quite a useful feature. > > Thanks > Peter
From: Atreides on 22 Feb 2005 21:33
> Who would would possibly know why they did it this way? What's the point of > wasting time speculating about WHY? When confronted with something that is so incredibly against convention (and that I have somehow not noticed for the last 10 or so years), it pulls terribly at my curiosity. Also, to increase my understanding of computers and calculating program. > You have a problem to solve. I would think your time would be better spent > on that aspect. Fundamentally, you need to add parentheses to an expression > like -X^2 so it becomes -(X^2). Yes, this is the obvious fix. However, I have been (and will continue to) copy formulas from Mathematica (in Input Form, which is almost identical to Excel format, except for issues like this). If I could avoid all past and future manual changes to be spreadsheets, this would be incredibly valuable. But alas. Here's to checking assumptions... Cheers, Peter |