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What do you mean when you type in '"1/2" + 1'? Unless you just want to keep that text as plain text, it's going to be doing some interpreting.
by SamBam 2y ago
What do you mean when you type in '"1/2" + 1'?
Unless you just want to keep that text as plain text, it's going to be doing some interpreting.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoDevil’s devil’s advocate here for better interpretations: - 1.5 - CONV_ERR: invalid operator for type TEXT
- jayd16 2y agoThe answer is 1/21, clearly. I guess what it should do is give a green squiggly if the implicit conversions are suspicious.
- realo 2y agoI cannot imagine any programming language interpret "1/2" as a day and month in that specific context. It takes a very special mindset to do that, maybe the kind that comes from a junior MBA manager, for example ... and even then I find that farfetched. It sounds more like one of those things that is observed, but some manager decided it is not high priority enough to fix right away. And then technical debt raises its ugly head.
- hnlmorg 2y ago“1/2” is a string. So “1/2”+1 is either an error because of datetype mismatch (which is terrible UX for a spreadsheet or going to mean one of the following to scenarios: Date plus a day “1/2” concatenates with “1” The latter is wrong, the former, while unexpected, does kind of make the most sense here.
- SAI_Peregrinus 2y agoExcel allows bare strings, so `"1/2" + 1` is a string with embedded quotation marks. So that's a third option for what to do.
- hnlmorg 2y agoTrue. And that would probably make the most sense too. A very good point you’ve made there :)
- dmurray 2y agoWhy would you favour "date plus a day" rather than "number plus a number"? I agree Excel has to guess, and in isolation guessing that "1/2" should be parsed a date is not a terrible choice, and that parsing the individual components separately is simpler and more predictable than using the full context that it's about to be added to a number. But evaluating to 1.5 would raise few eyebrows.
- hnlmorg 2y ago> Why would you favour "date plus a day" rather than "number plus a number"? Date is a number though. It’s only when we print them in a human readable way that they become anything else. Whereas 1/2 is an expression.
- fragmede 2y agoHaven't seen "1/21" as an answer yet
- hnlmorg 2y agoAn answer where? Not sure I follow
- fragmede 2y agoI just wanted to introduce "1/21" as an answer
- hnlmorg 2y agoAhh I see the confusion now. I suggested it in the comment you were replying to: > “1/2” concatenates with “1” …and thought you’d spotted that and was saying others had disagreed with the concatenation way of handling + operators with strings.
- fragmede 2y ago"“1/2” concatenates with “1”" != "1/21"
- hnlmorg 2y agoThat’s literally what concatenation is.
- fragmede 2y ago> Concatenate is a process of combining two or more strings into a single larger string. It's an important function in programming and computing because it allows you to store and combine multiple pieces of data when needed. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/glossary/concatenate/#:~:text=Concatenate%20is%20a%20process%20of,pieces%20of%20data%20when%20needed. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/glossary/concatenate/#:~:text=C... That doesn't make those two strings equal, however.
- thesuitonym 2y agoIf I type in 1/2, that means 1 divided by 2, or 0.5. If I then type +1, that means add 1. 1/2 I should never mean any kind of date, unless I'm entering it into a field that has already been declared a date field, or I have written that, then declared the field to be a date field.
- post-it 2y agoI think most people that enter `1/2` in a spreadsheet do indeed mean `January 2nd` and not `0.5`. In the wider world of people using spreadsheets, dates are certainly more common than fractions.
- lawn 2y agoIn Sweden we don't use that numbering scheme and instead use Day/Month Year (which makes more sense as it goes from smaller to larger).
- brassattax 2y agoIt would be interesting to know if your Excel correctly interprets 1/2 as 1st February based on your international settings.
- dreghgh 2y agoSpoiler: it does.
- niij 2y agoI think it's just what you're used to. If counting from smallest to largest was inherently better, then a dozen would look like 21, not 12. Little vs Big Endian, I suppose.
- lawn 2y agoThe issue is when you do Month/Day/Year, then you lose consistency. Both Year/Month/Day or Day/Month/Year are more logical.