What do you mean when you type in '"1/2" + 1'?
Unless you just want to keep that text as plain text, it's going to be doing some interpreting.
Unless you just want to keep that text as plain text, it's going to be doing some interpreting.
- 1.5
- CONV_ERR: invalid operator for type TEXT
It takes a very special mindset to do that, maybe the kind that comes from a junior MBA manager, for example ... and even then I find that farfetched.
It sounds more like one of those things that is observed, but some manager decided it is not high priority enough to fix right away. And then technical debt raises its ugly head.
Date plus a day
“1/2” concatenates with “1”
A very good point you’ve made there :)
I agree Excel has to guess, and in isolation guessing that "1/2" should be parsed a date is not a terrible choice, and that parsing the individual components separately is simpler and more predictable than using the full context that it's about to be added to a number. But evaluating to 1.5 would raise few eyebrows.
Date is a number though. It’s only when we print them in a human readable way that they become anything else.
Whereas 1/2 is an expression.
> “1/2” concatenates with “1”
…and thought you’d spotted that and was saying others had disagreed with the concatenation way of handling + operators with strings.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/glossary/concatenate/#:~:text=C...
That doesn't make those two strings equal, however.
You can try string concatenation in 3 differently languages using the links below:
https://www.w3schools.com/python/python_strings_concatenate....
https://go.dev/play/p/Q5VPF2ANk7Y
https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_concat_string.asp
Edit: who said anything about making both side of the operator equal? That’s not how operators work.
1/2 I should never mean any kind of date, unless I'm entering it into a field that has already been declared a date field, or I have written that, then declared the field to be a date field.