Rant: Text Functions

[T. Valko]

Excel sorely needs an EFFICIENT function or array of functions for dealing with uniques!

I'm sure that we could come up with dozens of useful functions that Excel is missing.

Why is there a "width" argument to the CELL function but there is no "height" argument?

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

Why is there a "width" argument to the CELL function but there is no "height" argument?

Well there are still the XLM functions that can achieve these sorts of things. Anyone have any idea when these will actually be dropped? I purposely avoid XLM functions but I do feel that it would be a mistake to drop them until such time as there are suitable alternatives for some of the many useful features...

 

[hrlngrv]

CELL is nearly useless because it's frozen in the past, compatible with Lotus 123 Release 2.2 from 23 years ago. Lotus added a lot of useful items to @CELL/@CELLPOINTER and @INFO in 123 Release 3, but MSFT didn't touch Excel's CELL or INFO. They've become two of the most worthless functions in Excel even if they are used more often than the Bessel functions or BAHTTEXT.

 

[hrlngrv]

Raising the question why MSFT hasn't made the information XLM functions like GET.CELL available in standard worksheets. And I hope MSFT doesn't drop XLM macro/udf support. You can still do things with XLM you can't do with VBA. See

http://fastexcel.wordpress.com/2012...ted-value-from-the-calling-cells/#comment-396

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

And there are bits where the XLM method is more superior than the VBA equivalent. Ok so I can only think of one but I'm sure there are more. The one I can think of is the PAGE.SETUP function.

http://www.mcgimpsey.com/excel/udfs/pagesetup.html

So I know this is going away from formula, but my 2c on why I too don't look forward to the day that XLM is removed.

 

[Michael M]

Hmm, a function in Excel that allows the user to create a Regex ....can you imagine how well microsoft could make that almost impossible to understand, let alone actually work.
I'm still having trouble with Espresso !!!
But I'd love to see it !!

 

[RoryA]

The PAGE.SETUP problem is alleviated in 2010 to a large degree.

 

[arkusM]

And there are bits where the XLM method is more superior than the VBA equivalent. Ok so I can only think of one but I'm sure there are more. The one I can think of is the PAGE.SETUP function.

http://www.mcgimpsey.com/excel/udfs/pagesetup.html

So I know this is going away from formula, but my 2c on why I too don't look forward to the day that XLM is removed.

This Post helps with the syntax in the above link's code

 

[hrlngrv]

Excel's developers would only need to borrow the code from the VBScript Regular Expressions library. Heck, they could even start with Word's Find and Replace wildcards.