Author Archives: dougaj4

More powers of 3

Posted on October 20, 2019

Following the discovery of a question to which the answer is 42, the same team has now reported a sum of three cubes equal to 3.  As before, the result can be checked from Excel, linking to mpmath, via pyxll. … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general, Excel, Link to Python, Maths, Newton, PyXLL | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Restoring sound on an HP computer.

Posted on October 13, 2019

Yesterday the sound on my HP Omen computer stopped working for no apparent reason.  I found the video below, which fixed the problem: The video is short, easy to follow, and doesn’t need the sound working to understand it! The … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

A problem with integers in VBA

Posted on October 1, 2019

A recent question at Quora asked: “Why am I getting an overflow error in Excel VBA when doing a simple arithmetic calculation like str1 = 24*60*30 where str1 is a variant or long or double?” I hadn’t encountered that problem … Continue reading →

Posted in Excel, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Indexing pdf files, yet again

Posted on September 24, 2019

Recent versions of Windows have provided indexing of file contents that allows for fast searches over the entire contents of your hard disk.  This includes pdf files, but the default filter file only works with 32 bit Windows.  It is  … Continue reading →

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The answer to Life the Universe and Everything …

Posted on September 19, 2019

is 42, as is well-known: The actual question, to which the answer is 42, is not known, but a lesser known long standing question involving this number has recently been solved: The original problem, set in 1954 at the University … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing - general, Excel, Maths, Newton, PyXLL | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Plotting Mandelbrot

Posted on September 15, 2019

There are many sites discussing the Mandelbrot Set, but not many examples using VBA to plot the set in Excel, so here is my effort: The spreadsheet (including open source VBA code) may be downloaded from: Mandelbrot chart.zip Note that … Continue reading →

Posted in Charts, Charts, Coordinate Geometry, Drawing, Excel, Maths, Newton, VBA | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Using conditional formatting with array formulas

Posted on August 17, 2019

A recent Quora question asked “How do I highlight the number closest to an initial number in a row in Excel?“.  The answer by Bill Jelen provides a good example of using conditional formatting with an array formula: In my … Continue reading →

Posted in Arrays, Excel | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment