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



you are right sir. the only mystery to me is why it still exists. After
reading all these posts and searching on my own I now see that "computer
math" can diverge from from "classroom math" on these issues. I consider it
sad but not terribly surprising. I admit to ignorance of the quirks, but
don't admit that it's okay. Why don't many of the softwares work like a
math major would expect? ... Probably because the developers/project
managers weren't math majors. If the program as the subject of discussion
were an English language program, would it be okay for a program to be
making up its own rules of grammer? If the developers and project managers
were not English majors we'd get the same thing as with the math rules.
Would that be okay with you?

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

"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.