Found a SERIOUS bug in Excel !!!

[irresistible007]

Dear everyone,

I have found today a very annoying bug today while working on Exce
2003, below is the thing, please advise your opinion as how should
troubleshoot the issue:

I have a Sheet detailing each and every order of various products lik
in this way:

A= CUSTOMER NAME, B= PRODUCT NAME, C= QUANTITY.... (OTHER AR
IRRELEVANT TO MENTION

Sometimes our customer request partial shipment so lets say the produc
is Gamma, i enter info in excel in following way:

A1(merged with cell A2)= ABC company, B1 & B2 (not merged)= Gamma
C1=5, C2=10

At the end of this huge list i have made a simple summary for quic
ref. in cell E141 I put an array formula to know how much a specifi
customer has bought a specific product:

E141 {=SUM(IF((LEFT(A1:A117, 3)="ABC")*(LEFT(B1:B117, 5)="Gamma")
C4:C117, 0))}

The above formula gave me after summing C1 (didnt included C2)

I have checked for the reason and found that when i click cell A
merged with A2... It shows under name Box A1 so in this way A2 lost it
identity !! hence when the above formula calculates it didnt checked fo
cell C2...

I can troubleshoot by simply entering the customer name separatly int
A1 & A2 but I wouldn't prefer this cuz merged cells indicates sam
order to me and you would probably agree that its nonsense to mentio
the customer's name 2 times instead of mentioning 1 time for his singl
order with two separate shipments...

I think i have pointed towards a serious issue

 

[Jezebel]

If your formulas are as unintelligible as your explanation of the problem,
it's hardly surprising if your sheet doesn't work as you expect. Fuzzy
writing = fuzzy thinking.





"irresistible007" <[email protected]>
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[Bob Phillips]

That is not a bug, but a misunderstanding by you of how merged cells works.


When you merge cells A1 and A2, you are not copying the value in A1 to A2,
but just increasing the space that A1 takes up by cell A2. A2 actually still
exists, and is empty, so will fail the tests in your formula.

To see this, somewhere on the worksheet, enter =A2, you will see you get 0,
not ABC Company.

If you must persist with merged cells, you could use

=SUMPRODUCT(--(MOD(ROW(A1:A116),2)=1),--(LEFT(A1:A116,3)="ABC"),--(LEFT(B1:B
116,5)="Gamma"),C1:C116)+SUMPRODUCT(--(MOD(ROW(A2:A118),2)=0),--(LEFT(A1:A11
7,3)="ABC"),--(LEFT(B2:B118,5)="Gamma"),C2:C118)

--

HTH

RP
(remove nothere from the email address if mailing direct)


"irresistible007" <[email protected]>
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