Unintuitive or otherwise unexpected useful little tidbits.


- to get the numerical-value for a cell, but to return 0 if the cell isn't numerical, there are two things you can do:

        - the most obvious:         =IF(ISNUMBER(A1),VALUE(A1),0)

        - not obvious at all:       =MAX(A1,A1)

                        (don't ask me why this works, but it does... at least in Office 2003)
                        (almost every other function returns #VALUE! when taking an argument that *should* be a value, but is not)
                                    (one question is why Excel doesn't just do implicit type coercion most of the time)
                                    (the other is:  why does it only do it in one or two instances?)