"fred" wrote...
....
Ignorance -- I hope you meant "not knowing", not "being an idiot."

Yes. I admit to my own ignorance from time to time. There's nothing wrong
with ignorance as long as it's addressed once discovered.

Now, elsewhere in this thread I mentioned that Excel really isn't
mathematical software but an overgrown calculator, and Excel's unary minus
operator works like HP [CHS] or TI [+/-] keys when pressed before their
respective [x^y] keys. FWIW, that's the best mnemonic I can offer. However,
if you want to avoid ambiguity at the cost of some loss of flexibility, use
Excel's POWER function instead of the ^ operator. Does the same thing
without ambiguity.