Excel help

pinno
pinno Posts: 52,449
edited May 2014 in The cake stop
Bit rusty in this department (apart from cooking the books and doing dodgy cash flow forecasts).

I am trying to create a (cycling related) look up table. If you are willing to divulge your e-mail address, please PM me.
I have done the hard bit. The table is there, I need a function so I can use the data created to make a calculation.

Ta.
seanoconn - gruagach craic!

Comments

  • arran77
    arran77 Posts: 9,260
    PM's are busted at the moment, keep up :P

    Even if they weren't do you think I'd be stupid enough to let you have my email address.....oh hang on :wink:
    "Arran, you are like the Tony Benn of smut. You have never diluted your depravity and always stand by your beliefs. You have my respect sir and your wife my pity" :lol:

    seanoconn
  • ballysmate
    ballysmate Posts: 15,996
    arran77 wrote:
    PM's are busted at the moment, keep up :P

    Even if they weren't do you think I'd be stupid enough to let you have my email address.....oh hang on :wink:


    OMG. What have I done? :shock:
  • Crankbrother
    Crankbrother Posts: 1,695
    I sent you an email ... Get in touch if you still need help ...
  • pinno
    pinno Posts: 52,449
    I sent you an email ... Get in touch if you still need help ...

    Cheers fella, I sent you an attachment.
    seanoconn - gruagach craic!
  • Crankbrother
    Crankbrother Posts: 1,695
    I sent you an email ... Get in touch if you still need help ...

    Cheers fella, I sent you an attachment.

    Done (maybe, given I was just guessing what you wanted) ...
  • pinno
    pinno Posts: 52,449
    Cheers Crankbrother, a cyber pint of 80 shilling is in the ethernet for you. (None of that warm beer shyte or feeble 'Pale ale').
    seanoconn - gruagach craic!
  • Have you tried switching it off and on again?
    I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles
  • arran77
    arran77 Posts: 9,260
    Have you tried switching it off and on again?

    Failing that try this....

    AhT3Rs.jpg
    "Arran, you are like the Tony Benn of smut. You have never diluted your depravity and always stand by your beliefs. You have my respect sir and your wife my pity" :lol:

    seanoconn
  • seanoconn
    seanoconn Posts: 11,712
    arran77 wrote:
    Have you tried switching it off and on again?

    Failing that try this....

    AhT3Rs.jpg
    What's a giant lemon got to do with Piña's laptop??
    Pinno, מלך אידיוט וחרא מכונאי
  • pinno
    pinno Posts: 52,449
    seanoconn wrote:
    arran77 wrote:
    Have you tried switching it off and on again?

    Failing that try this....

    AhT3Rs.jpg
    What's a giant lemon got to do with Piña's laptop??

    It is probably the best solution for my laptop especially as it runs on Windows Hate.

    How did you know I have a laptop, are you spying on me?
    seanoconn - gruagach craic!
  • seanoconn
    seanoconn Posts: 11,712
    seanoconn wrote:
    arran77 wrote:
    Have you tried switching it off and on again?

    Failing that try this....

    AhT3Rs.jpg
    What's a giant lemon got to do with Piña's laptop??

    It is probably the best solution for my laptop especially as it runs on Windows Hate.

    How did you know I have a laptop, are you spying on me?
    I hacked into your webcam :D but I soon hacked out again! :shock: The horror, the horror, the horror
    Pinno, מלך אידיוט וחרא מכונאי
  • arran77
    arran77 Posts: 9,260
    seanoconn wrote:
    seanoconn wrote:
    arran77 wrote:
    Have you tried switching it off and on again?

    Failing that try this....

    AhT3Rs.jpg
    What's a giant lemon got to do with Piña's laptop??

    It is probably the best solution for my laptop especially as it runs on Windows Hate.

    How did you know I have a laptop, are you spying on me?
    I hacked into your webcam :D but I soon hacked out again! :shock: The horror, the horror, the horror

    Was he strutting around in that gimp suit again :wink:
    "Arran, you are like the Tony Benn of smut. You have never diluted your depravity and always stand by your beliefs. You have my respect sir and your wife my pity" :lol:

    seanoconn
  • tlw1
    tlw1 Posts: 22,184
    arran77 wrote:
    seanoconn wrote:
    seanoconn wrote:
    arran77 wrote:
    Have you tried switching it off and on again?

    Failing that try this....

    AhT3Rs.jpg
    What's a giant lemon got to do with Piña's laptop??

    It is probably the best solution for my laptop especially as it runs on Windows Hate.

    How did you know I have a laptop, are you spying on me?
    I hacked into your webcam :D but I soon hacked out again! :shock: The horror, the horror, the horror

    Was he strutting around in that gimp suit again :wink:

    I recon it was worse...... He was out of it
  • jimmythecuckoo
    jimmythecuckoo Posts: 4,719
    Excel is such a frustrating programme I often need "help" after using it.

    Good luck.
  • morstar
    morstar Posts: 6,190
    Excel is such a frustrating programme I often need "help" after using it.

    Good luck.

    Really? Surely only a frustrating program if you don't like numbers full stop. That's not a fault of the program.

    If you have any affinity for number work it is an amazingly powerful program.
  • pinno
    pinno Posts: 52,449
    Excel is such a frustrating programme I often need "help" after using it.

    Good luck.

    If you want a frustrating program, try doing Access Macro's.

    Excel is superb but like anything - only if you need it.
    seanoconn - gruagach craic!
  • RDW
    RDW Posts: 1,900
    Excel has some pretty horrible misfeatures. My favourite is its tendency to convert fields that look vaguely like dates into actual dates, silently corrupting the data. If a naive user has Excel installed and double-clicks on, say, a CSV file (which will usually have an Excel icon), Excel will helpfully open it and apply some pretty brain-dead guesswork to deciding what data type is in each field. Once a text field becomes a date and the file is saved there's no going back - the contents of the cell are permanently changed. Unlike Access, Excel doesn't give you any warning that it's decided 3 from a column of 50,000 text fields should be converted to dates, it just goes ahead and does it.
  • pinno
    pinno Posts: 52,449
    RDW wrote:
    Excel has some pretty horrible misfeatures. My favourite is its tendency to convert fields that look vaguely like dates into actual dates, silently corrupting the data. If a naive user has Excel installed and double-clicks on, say, a CSV file (which will usually have an Excel icon), Excel will helpfully open it and apply some pretty brain-dead guesswork to deciding what data type is in each field. Once a text field becomes a date and the file is saved there's no going back - the contents of the cell are permanently changed. Unlike Access, Excel doesn't give you any warning that it's decided 3 from a column of 50,000 text fields should be converted to dates, it just goes ahead and does it.

    No, not true. Click on/highlight the the cell(s) or range of cells. Click on Format > Cells > Select 'General' or otherwise from the list.
    seanoconn - gruagach craic!
  • desweller
    desweller Posts: 5,175
    RDW wrote:
    Excel has some pretty horrible misfeatures. My favourite is its tendency to convert fields that look vaguely like dates into actual dates, silently corrupting the data. If a naive user has Excel installed and double-clicks on, say, a CSV file (which will usually have an Excel icon), Excel will helpfully open it and apply some pretty brain-dead guesswork to deciding what data type is in each field. Once a text field becomes a date and the file is saved there's no going back - the contents of the cell are permanently changed. Unlike Access, Excel doesn't give you any warning that it's decided 3 from a column of 50,000 text fields should be converted to dates, it just goes ahead and does it.

    No, not true. Click on/highlight the the cell(s) or range of cells. Click on Format > Cells > Select 'General' or otherwise from the list.

    Doesn't always work unfortunately.

    Excel stores dates as floating point numbers - integers being whole days etc. If it's allowed to execute the conversion at load-time your spreadsheet will be full of these numbers rather than the original text.

    Avoidable, but you need to know your way around the program.
    - - - - - - - - - -
    On Strava.{/url}
  • RDW
    RDW Posts: 1,900
    DesWeller wrote:
    Excel stores dates as floating point numbers - integers being whole days etc. If it's allowed to execute the conversion at load-time your spreadsheet will be full of these numbers rather than the original text.

    Yes, this. To demonstrate, create a text file in (e.g.) notepad called 'test.csv' that contains the text:

    MAR1

    Typically, CSV files will be registered to Excel on Windows systems running Office, so double-clicking on the file will open Excel and present you with a spreadsheet where the first cell looks like this:

    Mar-01

    (or in whatever format Excel is configured to display dates). Changing the cell format to 'text' gives you Excel's internal numerical representation of March 1st (not the original string):

    36951

    One correct way to import data from CSV files is to use the data import wizard and specify what data type to use for each column (in this case 'text' will preserve the string 'MAR1'), but this isn't obvious to the inexperienced user (because just clicking on the file to import it seems to do the right thing). This is a significant problem for people working with biological data, who might have spreadsheets containing tens of thousands of gene names, a few of which Excel will interpret as dates and corrupt - these keep turning up in major online gene databases:

    http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80
    http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2012/10/ ... t-learned/