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Excel graph of the difference between two evaluations of the smallest root of a quadratic: direct evaluation using the quadratic formula (accurate at smaller b) and an approximation for widely spaced roots (accurate for larger b). The difference reaches a minimum at the large dots, and round-off causes squiggles in the curves beyond this minimum.
In a spreadsheet, cells can contain formulas referring to the contents of other cells; if the user changes the content of a cell, the values of all its dependent cells are automatically updated. In a similar fashion, the properties of components in a Power Fx program are connected by formulas (whose syntax is very reminiscent of Excel ) and ...
Excel offers many user interface tweaks over the earliest electronic spreadsheets; however, the essence remains the same as in the original spreadsheet software, VisiCalc: the program displays cells organized in rows and columns, and each cell may contain data or a formula, with relative or absolute references to other cells.
Excel 97 included a new and improved PivotTable Wizard, the ability to create calculated fields, and new pivot cache objects that allow developers to write Visual Basic for Applications macros to create and modify pivot tables; Excel 2000 introduced "Pivot Charts" to represent pivot-table data graphically
See also: the {{}} template. The #if function selects one of two alternatives based on the truth value of a test string. {{#if: test string | value if true | value if false}} As explained above, a string is considered true if it contains at least one non-whitespace character.
The ability to chain formulas together is what gives a spreadsheet its power. Many problems can be broken down into a series of individual mathematical steps, and these can be assigned to individual formulas in cells. Some of these formulas can apply to ranges as well, like the SUM function that adds up all the numbers within a range.
Note how the use of A[i][j] with multi-step indexing as in C, as opposed to a neutral notation like A(i,j) as in Fortran, almost inevitably implies row-major order for syntactic reasons, so to speak, because it can be rewritten as (A[i])[j], and the A[i] row part can even be assigned to an intermediate variable that is then indexed in a separate expression.
The functions are simple data validation and data type checking functions. The data validation functions determine whether it is possible to convert or coerce the data value given as an argument to the function to the type implied by the function name, and return a Boolean value recording whether it was possible or not.