Myrna Larson said:
I guess the issue is, why are you applying the color. Supposedly there's
some logic to the colors. You can build that same logic into your formula,
no?
....
An intersting point. Excel needs no superfluous functionality that could be
implemented using longer formulas. You could drop either AND or OR because
x AND y == NOT( (NOT x) OR (NOT y) )
x OR y == NOT( (NOT x) AND (NOT y) )
You could drop POWER and CONCATENATE (since both provide functionality that
simply mirrors operators). You could drop ISNONTEXT (has anyone ever used
this function?). You could drop LEFT and RIGHT since MID and LEN together
make them redundant. You could eliminate the DOLLAR and FIXED functions
since TEXT makes them unnecessary. I could go on, but I'll spare everyone.
Excel is bloatware. Adding more bloat would hardly be noticed. However,
Microsoft seems opposed to adding any spreadsheet-specific features to
Excel, such as more worksheet functions of any kind. I don't believe any
were added in either 2002 or 2003, and some add-in functions were
effectively removed (the absence of XLODBC.XLA from 2003 means no
SQL.REQUEST and no replacement provided).
The main problem with colors and other formatting is that they're not part
of the calculation machinery. Changing colors doesn't trigger recalculation,
so there's no robust way of making colors part of calculations. There are
crude hacks involving VBA, but they require manual recalculation. Since
making formatting changes trigger recalculation would significantly slow
down Excel, I don't have any sympathy for the OP's complaint.
