"fred" wrote...
....
This is in my help too:

Reference operators
- Negation (as in -1)
% Percent
^ Exponentiation
* and / Multiplication and division
+ and - Addition and subtraction
& Connects two strings of text (concatenation)
= < <= = < Comparison

But to me it's immaterial. Why don't they follow the normal mathematical
order? If I'm going to sort a list of numbers should I be expected to look
up the sort order to see if they deviated from the norm? No.

You may not like this, but this'll GUARANTEE you get didly squat from
Microsoft. They made NO SECRET of their operator precedence. That you and
your consultant FAILED to read Excel's documentation and simply ASSUMED that
Excel should work the way you expected it to is YOUR OWN FAULT!

Also, this has been discussed time & time again in the Excel newsgroups, so
it ain't new and there's no bounty you can expect for 'discovering' this.

This one's 6 years old.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...0toshiba-tecra

This one's 9 years old.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...rockwell.c om

Whether you care to believe it or not, your expensive exercise with your
consultant is nothing more than the price of ignorance.