Posts by Nicholas King

If you’re dealing with a situation where every single data point in the right-hand column is guaranteed to exist in the left—meaning it's physically impossible to have an empty cell in the final table on the left side—then the most straightforward approach would be to simply copy the left column over to a new sheet, and then... well, I guess you could just use VLOOKUP to pull in those right-side values.

Jamie Barrett7 said:Is there a way to create a new indented paragraph right after a heading without just smashing the Enter key and dealing with all that? I'm using Microsoft Office 2010.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by a "new indented paragraph."

Well, you still have to hit Enter to start a new paragraph after a heading—that’s just how it works. To handle the indentation, the easiest way is probably just to right-click, select Paragraph... and then manually set whatever values you need. You can also apply that same setting to a bunch of paragraphs at once if you highlight them first.

If you want a specific look to be permanently available, you'd really need to define it as its own custom Style, but that’s a bit more advanced than what I just described.

Timothy Lee29 said:Is it possible I messed something up, or is this just normal behavior? How can I check if I somehow scrambled the settings somewhere?

I suppose two possibilities come to mind—both of which rely on the assumption that you're working across multiple computers.

If you originally drafted the document in Microsoft Word 2003 on one machine and then saved it as a 2007 or 2010 version on another, it’s entirely possible the file size shrank because the .docx format is essentially just a zipped archive.

Alternatively, if you were working on a computer where Microsoft Word is configured to automatically downsample image resolution to 220 ppi without asking, then it makes perfect sense that the file size would drop (and, just as a side note—we should really say "file size" rather than "memory," as those aren't quite the same thing).

Then there's a third possibility, which wouldn't depend on how many different machines you use: it isn't impossible that Microsoft Word left some sort of unnecessary "junk" data within the file for some reason, and during the next save operation, it simply stripped that useless bloat away.

When you’re standing on someone else's shoulders, you get this fleeting illusion of being high up.

The fools—and there are plenty of them—will actually convince themselves that this is some sort of stable, permanent position. But a smart person? A smart person realizes that if those shoulders shift even just a fraction of an inch, they'll end up smashing their nose into the pavement—so, I suppose, they won't bother climbing on anyone else's shoulders in the first place.

jadelynx60 said:I have one more question. You told me to expand the task to fifty rows—now I just want to know how to actually go about doing that.

Come on, give it to me straight: what have you actually done to learn Excel, besides just "downloading" it?

Setting up a system-based task is easy enough if you can actually map it out mathematically—can you?

urbanfox18 said:If I try to enter something like that into Excel, it tells me there's a circular reference and just stops working.

Exactly—you've got a circular reference, so nothing happens. It’s just how it works; unless you start messing around with programming, cell C1 can't simultaneously hold its current value and act as a formula to set a new one. It's a logical impossibility, really.

Finally, I'd probably add a condition where if the sum in cell C is greater than the value entered in cell A, it turns red, but stays green as long as it's smaller.

Just look into Conditional Formatting; it's actually quite straightforward.

While you're at it, take a look at the section headings in this PDF—you'll find a specific topic covering basically everything related to Microsoft Office 😁.

I had gone under the assumption that the missing operation was exponentiation—though, if that's the case, we aren't actually dealing with particularly massive numbers.

jadelynx60 said:Hey there. I’ve got this one specific task in Excel that I need to tackle. Here is how it goes:

Find the first fifty terms of the following sequence and solve it using Excel:

(8/3*(1+2))^(1/2), (64/5*(1+2+4))^(1/3), (512/7*(1+2+4+8))^(1/4), . . .

Basically, each term in this sequence is made up of four different components—each shifting according to its own internal logic. You essentially derive each subsequent element from the one preceding it based on a set pattern.

In your first row, just enter 8, 3, 3, and 2—those are the starting values for the very first term.

Then, in the second row, you'll want to input: =A1*8; =B1+2; =C1+2^ROW(); =D1+1.

In column E, set up the formula =(A1/B1*C1)^(1/D1), then drag that down through fifty rows, and that should pretty much do the trick.

Maybe double-check the first couple of rows to be safe—I'm basically typing this out from memory here🙂.

Sarah Morales90 said:First off, what we're looking at isn't something we should be tossing around publicly—and honestly, it isn't nearly enough to build a case against anyone.

You've got a point there; I guess I overstepped when I brought up passing around IP Addresses—you know, the whole court order and legal procedure thing... My apologies 🙈.

At least give me some credit for that comparison to reporting an assault... it was a pretty sharp one, wasn't it? 😢

melloworca6 said:This reminds me—just a little bit, I suppose—of those situations where neighbors end up blaming one another for not calling the police when they heard screaming during a domestic dispute, almost as if they couldn't just pick up the phone and dial themselves. It’s always easiest to shift the burden of responsibility onto someone else, isn't it?

There is a distinction here.

Essentially, the moderators and the rest of the staff have an IP Address—which, in the context of a mandatory reporting obligation, creates a massive difference between reporting that "someone somewhere" is assaulting their partner versus reporting that Paul Bunyan is doing it.

Christian Taylor3 said:There’s no such thing as "separate property" within a marriage—you really ought to go read up on Family Law.

Where exactly in Family Law does it address the privacy of someone's personal correspondence? 😕 A letter, a text, or whatever else is private because of the content itself, not just because of who owns the computer or the phone.

But, I suppose the real point is something else entirely: the legal obligation to report a crime typically only applies to serious felonies, and what we're looking at here isn't exactly a major felony. And that's basically it 🙂.

jadeseal4 said:That’s probably right.
I suppose I should sit tight while certain moderators—who were clearly raised with impeccable manners, mind you—explain to me why planting falsehoods under the guise of being "politically close" is somehow a valid justification for moving threads. At least, that's what they seem to claim.

My personal forum motto has always been "Apolitical" 🙂, but even from this distance, I can't wrap my head around why (not) counting posts would serve any purpose other than acting as an "idiot detector" for those people who think they have a legitimate argument like, "Ha! You have a million posts, which obviously means you're a total loser, ha! Ha!!!".

The truth is, a real point will be read and recognized even if a person had to clear away a massive spiderweb just to write it out in a formal debate.

jadeseal4 said:Who was playing games here, and what was the motive?

The person who moved the "extracurricular activities" thread—along with your hundred or so posts about it—over to Politically Close, where the posts aren't even tracked by a counting archive?

Michelle Phillips54 said:they just ignored that and moved straight into dragging Nora's mother through the mud.

The two biggest attacks on Nora's mother (in posts that haven't been scrubbed yet) are these lines:

"now even I'm getting pissed off (the mother, let's be clear here).
(...)
To me, this mother seems more and more like a total patient. "

I honestly think it would take me maybe 34 and a half seconds to find much harsher rants against specific people in the same PDF—and that’s without even quoting comments about the late Boris Šprem on the same thread—that didn't manage to offend any moderator's fragile ego; in fact, those comments actually knew how to serve as decent local banter.

So, I suppose "how Arsen gets a million bucks and a new liver" is just some moderator wit and not an actual jab at Arsen Dedić?

Elizabeth Baker38 said:I didn't lock this thread because some new forum rule suddenly banned discussing Nora Fora or anything related to her—that’s not it at all. I did it because, in my opinion, the conversation had crossed a line and moved far beyond what qualifies as a healthy debate.

Dragging the late Boris Šprem through the mud—especially using outright falsehoods—doesn't exactly strike me as "crossing a line" worthy of a moderator warning, let alone a full-blown thread lock, does it?😕

Tyler Baker6 said:😍 Nothing personal, it just reminded me of this joke:

Hercegovac wants to get his son a job, so he calls up a "high-ranking government official:"
- No problem at all. I'll get him a spot in Congress, he'll pull in about $6.75 and won't have to lift a finger.
- You know, I'd actually prefer if he did some actual work. Something a bit more modest.
- Fine. I'll make him a Director. He'll get $5.00 and will have to do a little bit of work.
- But I'd really like him to work more, you know, to learn the ropes...
- Alright, alright. Let's make him an Executive Assistant at a corporation; he'll get $3.25 and he'll definitely have plenty to do.
- Still, I'd prefer something a bit lower scale.
- For heaven's sake, how much salary are we talking about here?
- Around $1333.
- Oh, well, that's not going to work. For that kind of money, he's gonna need a college degree.

If we weren't talking about Hercegovac, I suppose the joke would be—well, maybe—about 28.3% less funny? 🙄

cosmicdrifter39 said:So, if I consider 184 hours to be my total working hours for January, anyone who worked 181 hours would technically be down by 4 hours—and I was wondering if there is any way to display those 4 hours in a cell as -4:00 so that I can actually use that value for further calculations.

Well, you have a few different ways to approach this:

- You could calculate the absolute value instead, then just handle the negative result using an IF statement;

- Or, you could simply format the cell containing the negative hours as a standard number rather than a time format—this won't change the actual underlying value, it just means instead of seeing -4:00:00, you'll see something like -0.1666667.

- Alternatively, you could switch over to the "1904 Date System."

cosmicdrifter39 said:it won't let me display negative time values in my cells

I mean, what does "negative time" even actually signify—setting aside how Excel behaves? In what realistic scenario would you ever need to account for "minus two hours" in a calculation?

You could just use =ABS(A1-A2) to get the raw difference, and then handle whatever sign logic you need using an IF statement.

jadecyclist42 said:Good grief, you clearly didn't read what I wrote, yet you're trying to lecture me??!

I think I mentioned about twenty-five times how this campaign works on the exact same principle as Nora's case.

There is a Facebook page where one of the admins is the mother herself, so you can contact her directly to ask for specifics.
A local non-profit has stepped in, and we're just waiting on the phone number for donations to help little Anastasia.
The page has nearly a million photos showing the girl's journey through the months in the hospital.
There are news articles too; I personally linked stories from major US outlets.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pomoz...ref=ts&fref=ts

The only real difference between Nora and little Anastasia is that Nora was lucky enough that her parents "know the right people," so she got much more publicity than, say, Stephanie or little Anastasia.

No, I'm not Anastasia's parent; I'm just noticing that not everyone is as well-connected or as lucky as Nora and her family.
What I really resent about the admin of Nora's page is that he wasn't able—aside from Zanetti, who probably only posted because of Mateo Kovačić's suggestion—to like or support the pages of other children in need. Once it became obvious that Nora
would raise the necessary funds, he could have at least made that gesture, especially since his page gained an insane amount of likes.
For comparison, little Stephanie had just over 10,000 likes, while Nora's page has over 80,000 as of today. That kind of exposure could have been used for other kids and pressing issues, but I guess not.

This child only has her single, very young mother, who is forced to live on $533 welfare benefits for single moms because she's renting in Washington, D.C., since she isn't originally from there, while the little girl receives treatment here and waits for a transplant in Italy.

Watch your mouth, will you? 🤦.

Ashley Kern17 said:What’s the easiest way to actually wrap my head around the language used in macros—basically, how to write VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)?

Look, if you don't have any background in programming—and I mean zero—and you aren't dealing with a task that can be solved by simply recording a Macro command (which, based on what you've described, clearly isn't working for you), then honestly? It might be more practical to just find someone who can build it for you for a little bit of cash.