what does the "carat" character mean in Excel - answer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Daryl S
  • Start date Start date
D

Daryl S

Jackson -

I can't reply to your posting directly - I suspect the "^" character in your
posting subject may be the culprit.

To answer your question, the carat represents a 'to the power of' operation.
That is x^2 means x squared (x times itself). y^3 means y cubed (y times y
times y).

Hope that helps!
 
Daryl,

it's probably something to do with the browser that you use to access
the newsgroups. If a poster does not expand on his heading for the
thread and use the message body, then some browsers do not allow you
to respond to it.

Hope this helps.

Pete
 
Daryl,
You are correct but need to add that ^ is called the exponentiation operator
best wishes
 
One would think it would be a simple matter to have some sort of check to
make sure a poster puts something in the body of the message, or have it
default to "no text"...

Until then, we can only hope people will one day learn the difference
between "subject" and "message".
 
Pete_UK said:
it's probably something to do with the browser
that you use to access the newsgroups.
Click to expand...

Hmm, I always thought it was simply yet-another thing that is wrong with the
MS Discussion Groups web interface, independent of the browser.

For example, using IE6 to respond to the original subject-only posting via
MSDG and Google Groups, I have no problem creating a response using GG. It
is only MSDG that fails.

I am unable to test my theory using Firefox because I cannot even log into
MSDG using FF.

(That might be an intermittent problem with the MSDG service. Now, I am
getting Service Unavailable errors with both IE6 and FF.)


----- original message -----


Daryl,

it's probably something to do with the browser that you use to access
the newsgroups. If a poster does not expand on his heading for the
thread and use the message body, then some browsers do not allow you
to respond to it.

Hope this helps.

Pete
 
Jackson -

I can't reply to your posting directly - I suspect the "^" character in your
posting subject may be the culprit.

To answer your question, the carat represents a 'to the power of' operation.
 That is x^2 means x squared (x times itself).   y^3 means y cubed (ytimes y
times y).

Hope that helps!
Click to expand...

Hi All! I'm read thru the thread here and still don't quite understand
the double carat use of "^^".

Please advise.
Thanks, Matty
 
Double caret ^^ does nothing.

=2^^3 throws an error.

Maybe you meant to type =2^3^4 which is same as =2^12

Where have you seen a double caret ^^ used?

I sometimes use ^^ in an edit>replace operation.

Edit>Replace

What: =

With: ^^

Replace all.

I will do this when I want to copy linked formulas from one workbook to
another without creating a link to source workbook.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP
 
Hi Gord,

I saw a post the other day where someone was suggesting a formula
using SUBSTITUTE to replace a space with 2 carets - presumably because
this is a character sequence that one would not normally encounter -
similar to your Find & replace example. Maybe fullgale1 saw that same
post.

Pete
 
Very true............I have seen that particular ^^ used with the SUBSTITUTE
function.


Gord
 
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