Last year I set up an Excel spread sheet to create a parts list for my 22 kitchen cabinet doors and 27 drawers. When entering the dimensions there were many times when the rails or stiles had to be calculated as the carcass openings were slightly different.
To my surprise if I entered a fraction Excel stayed quite happy. As an example enter 17 7/8 in the first cell and 4 7/8 in the next cell. Then in the third cell put an equal = sign and click on the first cell, then a plus + sign then the second cell. Excel happily calculates the result as 12 9/16.
If you get into this you can format the results cell output as sixteenths, thirty-seconds or whatever you like. (Apologies if this is common knowledge, it was new to me.)
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What am I missing, it is early, but when I add 17 7/8 + 4 7/8 I get 22 3/4. Nothing I can do to these two numbers, early in the AM, gives me 12 9/16.
The math I use does not add up either!
Sorry, too early. My + should have been a -. It's correctly set up in the attachment.
Sorry for the unwarrented criticism. Glad to know Excel does fractions. Took me a long time in Grade school to get there.
Mostly unrelated but also cool, in older versions of excel you were able to get it to run a racing game (directly in excel). Unfortunately that feature was removed somewhere around excel 97 I think.
Thanks for posting and good info. On the app side, Fraction Calculator Plus is my go to.
Thanks for posting, did not know about this.
I do a lot of non-woodworking work with Excel but was not aware of this feature. Thanks for the tip. I toyed with it a bit. I noticed that for fractions only (e.g., 1/16, 1/8, etc. with no whole number) you must enter the data as "0 1/16" and "0 1/8") for Excel to recognize as a fraction.
Some calculations may result in a decimal. But if you use format painter and "paint" that result with your fraction format, it will display as expected.
The feature also seems to do well with multiplication and division. May be handy with cut list development.
The feature seems to do well with 64ths calculations but not with 128ths.
Interesting...
Excel: I’m pretty sure that’s a date.
Nobody in woodworking should be dealing with 128ths. Even 64ths.
Amen. It's like having a room thermostat calibrated in hundreths. Very precise and completely irrelevant.
I'm primarily using Excel for preparing a cut list. It's very good at organizing things. If you're careful it's easy to set up simple formulas to figure out how much wood you need. Then add 3o% for my mistakes in the learning process.