Hi
Can anyone shed light on this issue?
In an Excel table, it’s common for excel to display a 0 cell as a “-”
In Layout, it formats it as - 0
I’d be fine if it formatted it as 0 (though not ideal), but - 0 doesnt make a lot of sense to me. Is this a bug?
Zero is zero. Whether it be plus or minus.
Yes.
Huh?
As we all know, the Duke of York had 10,000 men. And when they were only half way up, they were neither up nor down. Surely zero, coming at the junction of positive and negative numbers is also neither up nor down (neither positive nor negative, if you prefer)?
Zero is an interesting concept and one that simply did not exist in mathematics for a very long time. Even in Shakespeare’s time, the notion of nothingness was shied away from as it suggested an absence of everything, including God. And they couldn’t have that!
This is most likely a consequence of computer floating point arithmetic. In such math, there are two possible representations of 0, and the second one is conventionally represented as -0. Which one is seen depends on the specific trail of calculations that produced it.
There are no calculations here, just manually entered values.
Excel formats the cell as - when 0 is entered.
Not sure why Layout does it differently when “preaerve excel formatting” is checked.
