[Dba-office] Fwd: Interesting Excel problem

Stuart McLachlan stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Tue Apr 11 14:48:45 CDT 2017


Others have pointed out, Contcatenate and & add strings together, not the value of the 
strings. You need to use + instead end up with the sum of the two parts.

That said, you can do it all without in a single step without having to go through  Text To 
Column:

=LEFT(A1,FIND(";",A1)-1)+MID(A1,FIND(";",A1)+1,3)/16


On 11 Apr 2017 at 13:11, Susan Harkins wrote:

> Our animal care submits some weights in a strange format:
> 
> pound;ounce
> 
> So, the baby bobcat's weights might resemble 10;7, 14;3, 14;8, and so
> on.
> 
> Parsing them is no problem. But, evaluating and returning poundage in
> decimal format is proving a challenge because I'm seeing something
> weird along the way. Specifically, regardless of how I concatenate the
> two values, I get unexpected results.
> 
> I used Column To Text to parse the values using the ; character as the
> delimiter. Pounds are in column B, the ounce value is in column C. In
> column D, I use the formula:
> 
> =C4/16
> 
> to convert the ounce value into a decimal value.
> 
> Here's where I run into trouble -- I've been unable to concatenate the
> pound integer and the results of that formula to return
> 
> 10.4375
> 
> 10 is the number of pounds; .4375 is 7 ounces, expressed as a decimal.
> 
> It's impossible to put them together!
> 
> I first tried
> 
> =B4&D4
> 
> which returns
> 
> 100.4375
> 
> instead of 10.4375.
> 
> I've tried CONCATENATE(). I've tried working with a text value instead
> of the results of a formula. I've tried TRIM() and ABS() -- there's
> something going on that I clearly don't understand.
> 
> There's probably an easier way to get what I need -- forest for the
> trees. But I don't understand why concatenating these two values --
> whether value or text -- wants to add a 0 to the integer.
> 
> Susan H.
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