Two Times Table

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Jeff Weir

So if you’ve played around with Tables a fair bit, then you probably would have noticed that you can merrily insert a row in the worksheet that intersects one table:

…but if you try the same thing on a row that intersects more than one table, the Insert, Delete, and Clear Contents options are grayed out (or greyed out, if you live where I live):

You may have tried to get around Excel’s veto by cutting or copying a row from somewhere else, then trying to insert it via the ungrayed (or ungreyed) Insert Copied Cells option:

…at which point Excel wiped that smirk of your face with this:

So I know when this happens. But I don’t understand why. Anyone have any ideas?

Celebrating my MVP award: Discount offer

Posted on October 7, 2014 by jkpieterse

Hi everyone!

Every quarter Microsoft announces who are the lucky ones to receive their Most Valuable Professional Award. An MVP award lasts a year, so for a quarter of the MVPs, October 1st is an important day.

I got re-awarded!

And to celebrate that I am offering a 3 day 50 percent discount on my Formula auditing tool: RefTreeAnalyser

From October 8, 2014 to October 10, 2104 you receive 50 % off of the list price when you enter this coupon code: MVP2014

Head over to my website and download the tool, you can try it for free!

Regards,
Jan Karel Pieterse
www.jkp-ads.com

MLB Runs By Inning

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Dick Kusleika

There is an office pool for the MLB post season that goes like this: Each participant is assigned a half inning per game in the ALCS, NLCS, and World Series. A participant may get the top of the 1st in one game and the bottom of the 6th in another game. There are 20 participants for each half of 10 innings and innings after 10 roll around to the beginning. Every run scored in an inning assigned to you earns you a point.

The challenge is to distribute the innings among the participants. If you always get the bottom of the 10th (an inning that’s rarely played for you non-sportsballers), you wouldn’t fair very well. But what other innings are traditionally good or bad? Is the first inning littered with runs while the fourth is sparse? I couldn’t find any historical data online, but I do have the results of a pool from last season.

Based on this data, I don’t think one post season (21 games) is enough. Why would innings 3, 6, and 7 be higher? Why would the bottom of the innings total 68 runs, 24 more than the top of the innings cumulative 44 runs?

I thought I could assign some sort of value to each half inning, then make sure that each participant got roughly the same value. But I didn’t expect such disparity in innings nor in top/bottoms, so I’m not sure that works. I think I’ll end up making sure everyone gets the 10th inning once, then an even distribution between 1-3, 4-6, and 7-9. And if someone gets the bottom of the 9th more than once, bad luck for him.