Hacker News Reader

One reason why Excel should never be used for anything real is because it lacks type safety. For example if you have to sum a columns of numbers and one of them was mistakenly input as text, rather than throwing an error, it will just ignore that entry. There are lots of other problems related to type safety as well.

View on HN

For example if you have to sum a columns of numbers and one of them was mistakenly input as text, rather than throwing an error, it will just ignore that entry.

There are ways around that. Here's something I just put together as an example:

=EXACT(COUNT(A2:A6),COUNTA(A2:A6))

That will only return true if all the cells in range A2:A6 contain numbers.

There are other approaches that would work, if that doesn't suit you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com