OK, so this is something that’s been bugging me for something like six years now, ever since the first time I had to program with Excel in a corporate setting.
Microsoft Excel is, in many ways, a nice program. It’s a little bloated for my modest needs, but I can well see that most of what I regard as useless cruft has its place in the grand scheme of things. It’s reasonably fast, and reasonably intuitive. Overall, Excel may well be my favourite MSoft product.
My principal criticism — and the reason for today’s rant — has to do with the gap between formatting and functionality. Specifically: when I’m assembling my final grades of a semester, I usually have various numbers marked by colouring either the text or the background. These colours tell me things: so-and-so handed in Worksheet X five weeks late (and so gets a tremendous penalty), so-and-so’s grade was adjusted for good and sufficient reasons, etc. Often, I would like the ability to treat these numbers differently from their conformist, black-on-white cousins.
The Excel IF function, however, does not seem to recognize tests based on the colour of a cell. Or if it does, it does so in an undocumented, hidden, and enigmatic manner that I’ve been unable to unriddle. And trying to bring VBA into it helps about as much as you might expect: not at all.
Of course, it’s possible — probable! — that I’ve just been consistently dense for the past several years on this topic. That wouldn’t surprise me very much, actually.