Excel Formula not Working

Symptoms:

I was working in Excel spreadsheet that was a downloaded csv sheet. I would put in a formula to sum a column and I would get this:

A

40

60

20

=sum(a1:a3)

The formula would not work. I changed it to average and still you only would get the text. The number

Gathering Information

I looked at the sheet and found that all the cell where formatted as text. This was because the sheet was an imported comma separated download of grades. Number are generally set flush right but the text was flush left.

Hypothesis

H1 Convert the cell format to numbers general. (Failed)

H2 Use error correct to covert text to numbers. (Accepted)

Results

The number stored as texts can be corrected using the excel error correcting utility. The cells have a green triangle in the upper left corner. See the video in previous post. You click on the diamond shaped and you get a dropped menu. Select convert to number.

See the movie in the previous steps to see the hands on instruction.

Reflection

Exporting data is tricky. This is a very simple example but imagine a whole school system's data needing adjustments.

Excel: Numbers as Text Video

Microsoft Office

Jetflash won’t Take Large File

My Jetflash 64 gb flash drive is stating: The disk in the destination drive is full. Insert a new disk to continue.

The disk is only half full and the file I am trying to copy is only 10 gigs.

Gathering Information

I have found out that the issue is the file format for the flash drive. The flash drive is formatted fat32 and that has a limit of 4 gigs for file sizes. See this link.

 

The error message indicates the disk is full not that file is too large.

Hypothesis

 

H0. Formatting the drive to be NTFS will fix the issue.

 

Results

 

H0 worked. I could not format the drive to NTFS on an XP PC but I could on Server 2008 PC.

Reflection

I found myself deleting all files and restarting the usb drive to try to fix this issue.  I assumed that the Windows has just lost track of the size of the disk. I wasted about 20 minutes on this before I did some research. Live search did not return the correct information but Google did. I need to not waste time before doing research.

I found the information on tansendusa.com very hard to find.  I don't think this website has been validated.  The webmaster seems to a lot of bells and whistles but it is really slow.

Great Big USB Drive