[X-Apps] AppleWorks 6.2.4 spreadsheet

[Doug McNutt]

At 11:40 -0500 12/6/03, Joel M. Rath wrote:
>At 5:54 AM -0800 12/6/03, X-Applications wrote:
>
>>I have done something stupid in AW 6 and cannot locate the source of trouble. I have a spreadsheet which is used to record software registration numbers and has never contained any arithmetic functions.
>
>2. Create 2 cells for sn entry - one for first 11 digits, next for remaining digits. Let's call these H5 & H6.Then in you "real" sn list , have cell = CONCAT(H5,H6). This will automatically convert the numbers into text & concatenate them.

There is an academic point to be learned here.

Things which are not numbers should never be converted to binary, either integer or floating point. There are all kinds of gotchas that can occur.

Look at your data and understand that zip codes, telephone numbers, serial numbers (as above) are not numbers. You would never think about multiplying them by something else and if there are commas and dashes in them you wouldn't want somebody to treat those like mathematical operators. A simple thing like 0.1 in a numeric string can result in an approximation to the original data when expressed in binary. Just as 1/3 is not expressible as an exact decimal fraction 1/10 can not be converted to an exact binary equivalent..

Option 2 above might fail on a 16 bit machine. Yeah, I know.  AppleWorks 6 wouldn't work either.

As others, and option 1, have suggested, the proper thing to do is to force a text format and avoid conversion to binary. Another very common spreadsheet, from Redmond WA, allows you to put a single quote mark in front of a string of digits to suppress conversion. The quote is suppressed when the cell is displayed. Formatting the cell as text will do the same thing

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-->  There are 10 kinds of people:  those who understand binary, and those who don't <--