Daily Archive: 2013.07.25

This morning’s annoyance.

I have this Excel spreadsheet. Believe it or not, that is not, in and of itself, the annoyance.

I have data in columns A & B, and column C consists of this formula:

=if(countblank($a2:$b2)=0,concatenate($b2, ", §", $a2), "")

This works perfectly, with one small exception: the formatting in cell $b2 (partial italics) is lost in the concatenation. Since I have a few hundred rows to deal with, hand-formatting (again, since I originally hand-formatted $b2 to begin with) is really annoying.

Yes, I know that Excel isn’t a word processor, and that formatting is for word processors. But, damnit, this should work.