Great explanation! It helped me go from completely clueless to .. having
SOME understanding

"JE McGimpsey" wrote:

Check out

http://www.mcgimpsey.com/excel/doubleneg.html

In article ,
Joe wrote:

I've noticed several posts which use the unary operators "--" before
implementing some function. Why is this done?

Here's an example:

=--(COUNTIF(A1,"CA*")0)