expatrie wrote...
As a structural engineer, I have occasional need for exponentials of
exponentials - Excel does not calculate these correctly - right to left, so I
need to put extra parentheses in the formula to adjust.
....

Excel also doesn't follow standard conventions with respect to sign and
exponentiation, e.g., -3^2 returns +9 rather than -9. This is perhaps
unfortunate, but it *IS* documented functionality. Excel's operator
precedence is given explicitly. Its strict left to right associativity
is mentioned in passing. Note: left to right associativity is common to
*ALL* spreadsheets, not just Excel. Nonstandard associativity (and
precedence) has been around since APL was introduced in the mid-1960s.

From online help ('About Formulas' topic):


The order in which Excel performs operations in formulas

Formulas calculate values in a specific order. A formula in Excel
always begins with an equal sign (=). The equal sign tells Excel that
the succeeding characters constitute a formula. Following the equal
sign are the elements to be calculated (the operands), which are
separated by calculation operators. Excel calculates the formula from
left to right, according to a specific order for each operator in the
formula.

Operator precedence

If you combine several operators in a single formula, Excel performs
the operations in the order shown in the following table. If a formula
contains operators with the same precedence - for example, if a
formula contains both a multiplication and division operator - Excel
evaluates the operators from left to right.

Operator Description
: (colon)
(single space)

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


This has been argued & argued & argued A LOT in the past in these
newsgroups. Microsoft isn't going to change Excel's specs in this
regard. Doing so would break too many existing workbooks/formulas. Your
only choices are get used to it or use different software.