Nice People Thread No. 14, all Nice and Proper

silvercar

michaels wrote: »

I would put in 1 litre or whatever the minimum is knowing I was getting £250 in points back.

I get those Tesco vouchers, each week I go and spend about a tenner of stuff liek milk and bread I can get anywhere and something else from the non-food that can be returned but makes the total up to the voucher spend amount. Make the purchase, use the voucher and then the next week the first thing I do is return the unwanted item straight back onto my credit card and repeat. I can't really stand Tesco but we do go the weeks we have such vouchers. (Oh and time it right and they do some good bakery reductions - 6 croissant we would never buy at £2.20 - really! - are often reduced to 25p - yummy!)

Assume that first sentence should be £2.50 not £250, before anyone gets over-excited.

I would never intentionally buy just to use a voucher with the sole intention of returning it, but that is just me.

GDB2222

I am looking at a spreadsheet formula that says:

=IF($A72<=L$35,MAX(0,($B$10*M71+$B$11*M72)/EXP($B$6 * $B$3/$B$5),$G$2*(L30-$G$3)),"")

This came from a spreadsheet in financial mathematics, so it needs to be dead accurate. Yet, it looks like the worst sort of coding**, and it is almost impossible to check. There must be a better way of doing this, that is less error-prone.

If somebody wrote procedural code like that, they'd be shown the door.

michaels

silvercar wrote: »

Assume that first sentence should be £2.50 not £250, before anyone gets over-excited.

I would never intentionally buy just to use a voucher with the sole intention of returning it, but that is just me.

They make the vouchers to encourage you to spend more than your normal spend (more than you can afford?) and hope that you will buy high margin 'treat' items, in other words to take advantage of the customer. There is nothing to stop them from deducting the voucher on the return if they wish to.

GDB2222 wrote: »

I am looking at a spreadsheet formula that says:

=IF($A72<=L$35,MAX(0,($B$10*M71+$B$11*M72)/EXP($B$6 * $B$3/$B$5),$G$2*(L30-$G$3)),"")

This came from a spreadsheet in financial mathematics, so it needs to be dead accurate. Yet, it looks like the worst sort of coding**, and it is almost impossible to check. There must be a better way of doing this, that is less error-prone.

If somebody wrote procedural code like that, they'd be shown the door.

Remind me never to ask you to QA my code. I like the newer version of excel where the fx box can have lots of lines and there are much less strict limits on nested functions.

vivatifosi

My favourite news story of the day...

sub-headline made me spit my tea out:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/16/anonymous_isis/

michaels

vivatifosi wrote: »

My favourite news story of the day...

sub-headline made me spit my tea out:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/16/anonymous_isis/

My boss spotted a BBC headline this morning 'Osborne IS planning cyber attack on UK'

GDB2222

vivatifosi wrote: »

My favourite news story of the day...

sub-headline made me spit my tea out:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/16/anonymous_isis/

That's wonderful!

GDB2222

michaels wrote: »

Remind me never to ask you to QA my code. I like the newer version of excel where the fx box can have lots of lines and there are much less strict limits on nested functions.

I suppose the question is whether you can understand your code 6 months later, yourself?

GDB2222

PasturesNew wrote: »

I can spot the error.

It does not have an error, but I only know that because I checked the end result against an independent source.

michaels

GDB2222 wrote: »

I suppose the question is whether you can understand your code 6 months later, yourself?

Obviously being a contractor the plan is that only I can understand the code 6 months later so there is no alternative but to renew my contract....

GDB2222

PasturesNew wrote: »

What if you entered -values into some cells?
Are the cells set to only accept certain value ranges?

This was a one-off spreadsheet that will not be used again. I should add that I did not devise the spreadsheet; I merely amended it a bit. If I had done it from scratch, I would have avoided a formula like that, probably by using a UDF. However, the question remains how best to make complicated spreadsheet formulae easier to understand and check?