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tchrist

10:10 PM

@bjb568 Locality illusion.

Santa Claus

10:23 PM

The ends justify the memes.

Tweeted by StartupLJackson on November 22, 2015 at 5:20 PM

SmokeDetector

10:38 PM

[ SmokeDetector ] Repeating words in answer: Extract numbers from cells containing mixed alpha-numeric strings by David Barbera on superuser.com

user259867

@SmokeDetector Ugh, what ugliness there. In Google Sheets it's =regexreplace(A1,"\D","")

Doorknob

=1*MID(A1,MATCH(TRUE,ISNUMBER(1*MID(A1,ROW($1:$9),1)),0),COUNT(1*MID(A1,ROW($1:‌$9),1))) is not much better :/

user259867

Is Excel oblivious of regular expressions? (Don't know, hardly ever used it)

Doorknob

Apparently

Braiam

@NormalHuman with a non-trivial amount of legwork (and some vba), yes it can stackoverflow.com/a/22542835/792066

user259867

10:47 PM

Yes, VBA has it but it's a somewhat separate thing from built-in spreadsheet commands.

Braiam

I was only trying to highlight the jerkiness of being technically correct but practically wrong

I don't use excel (or any other spreadsheet) for pattern matching

bjb568

11:00 PM

I don't see any use whatsoever for spreadsheet software.

There's like… programming.

Doorknob

...

bjb568

Tho, to be fair, excel was quite fun to play with when I was 4.

I used to make multiplication tables that went down to row 65535.

65536 hadn't been invented yet in that dark age.

Braiam

I have to use them to facilitate analytics on tabulated data, for statistics and economics

bjb568

I'd make a list of powers of two and wonder why the stupid thing couldn't do infinite precision integer arithmetic — "you can have text be as long as you want, so why do the numbers have to have all those zeros on the end?"

tchrist

@bjb568 Both flying and invisibility?

bjb568

11:09 PM

That'd be a violation of some VFR thing, wouldn't it?

user259867

11:22 PM

People who write surveys with 30+ pages of questions should understand that they are restricting the set of responses to people who are not that representative of the population.

Braiam

that's why there's monetary incentives, I guess

but still, that isn't representative

user259867

This one doesn't have any incentive... I still want to support the product (webwork.maa.org) but they are not making it easy by throwing questions after questions after questions.

Braiam

FR: all surveys should have a button "I want to get out here"

Santa Claus

11:42 PM

I don't need to research, I have made a mistake that I need help in fixing. You don't think ive tried researching? — Prince Rahmeer 9 hours ago