On Oct 23, 5:36*pm, Sasser wrote:


It's a throwback to LOTUS 123 and is tolerated by Excel but serves no
useful purpose. Simply use =

Please remember in future to post your question in the body of the
post and not the header.

Mike

Mike H wrote...
It's a throwback to LOTUS 123 and is tolerated by Excel but serves no
useful purpose. Simply use =
....

Does make one wonder why Excel can't strip it off since Excel does
strip off unary + from numeric literals and Excel strips off @ chars
before function names.

Good point but I've always believed (probably incorrectly) that because =-A2
is valid (and sometimes useful) the positive variation is tolerated

Mike

"Harlan Grove" wrote:

Mike H wrote...
It's a throwback to LOTUS 123 and is tolerated by Excel but serves no
useful purpose. Simply use =
....

Does make one wonder why Excel can't strip it off since Excel does
strip off unary + from numeric literals and Excel strips off @ chars
before function names.

Excel has automatically stripped it off (or changed it to "=") in
various versions. The Mac version still does it in more situations
than the PC version, depending on what formula is entered. It has
always seemed a bizarre thing to me to have changed this functionality
over the years, or that it depends on what is entered. Did a
programmer make a mistake? Leave something out from one version to
another? Just weird.

Also, it is much easier to type a + if you are used to using the 10key
portion of the keyboard. Since MS couldn't be bothered to keep an = on
the 10key. I think Apple still has it.

No reason at all.

Looks like the originator is an old Lotus hand.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:36:01 -0700, Sasser
wrote: