Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Excel issue

I was doing some reporting on the results of a large, complex MIP model. I made the unfortunate error of having some spurious blank cells. With the =SUM() function, skipping such cells is identical as considering them as zero, so there is no problem. With a =MIN() function however this is not the case. Even =MINA() will not help there:

image

It is sometimes good to work with different people on a project so that one of your collaborators can catch this before submitting results to the customer!

In this case the result was beneficial for us. With this, our estimated improvement in monthly revenue when using a MIP based model, increased from 250K euros to 300K euros.

2 comments:

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  2. Actually, that's a non-issue. It's defined behaviour. SUM does _not_ consider empty cells as zero. It ignores them. And so does PRODUCT. And MIN. And...

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