THIS IS NOT A BUG!!!!!

It's hard to say whether they "believed" you or not. You refused to say what
the issue is/was. If you had described the issue, then no *knowledgeable* user
of Excel would have believed you.

As (I think) JE has pointed out, you can find Excel's order of evaluation of
expressions in Help.

You find the following in the topic "About Calculation Operators":

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

Now those may not be the rules you expected, BUT, that's irrelevant.

I expected your "issue" would turn out exactly this way -- not an Excel bug,
just documented behavior that differs from your expecatations.

WRT damages, the EULA says "LIMITED WARRANTY FOR SOFTWARE PRODUCTS ACQUIRED IN
THE US AND CANADA. Microsoft warrants that the SOFTWARE PRODUCT will perform
substantially in accordance with the accompanying materials for a period of
ninety (90) days from the date of receipt."

Operator precedence is documented in those "accompanying materials", so Excel
is performing as documented, and you have no grounds for a suit or for
compensation.

I DO think you may have an "issue" with your consultant. You could easily make
the point that you have paid them to work with a product they aren't qualified
to work with. If your consultant really knew Excel and how to debug formulas,
he/she would have known to write the formula as =-(5^2).

Presumably the consultant DID give you some sort of guarantee, no?

You asked "What other surprizes await?!" If you used Help, you might not find
so many surprises.



On Tue, 03 Aug 2004 01:27:30 GMT, "fred" wrote:

BOULDERDASH!!! This is a horrible bug in Excel (whereof I was
previously unaware). It is very standard that exponentiaion takes
precedence over negation. Ask any semi-decent high school student to
draw a graph of y = -x^2, and what will you get?


Thank you sir!

As another poster noted, M.P.E.P is a programming forum, but told that it
violates math convention, they still argue. They probably just didn't
believe me.

Another said "much ado about nothing", but I think this is a horrible bug
too. Excel should at least follow regular math conventions. What other
surprizes await?!