Scientific Notation with Lower Case "e"

[Guest]

Excel 2000 allows scientific notation to use either upper or lower case "e"
in scientific notation (e.g. the format "0.0e+0" is accepted). However,
Excel 2003 does not seem to allow the use of lower case "e" in either the
text formatting or the TEXT function. Does anyone know why this was changed?
Is there any way to get Excel 2003 to accept the lower case "e"?

Thanks,
Cory

 

[Fred Smith]

This may be more work than you want to go to, but you could create the result
using TEXT, then convert "E" to "e" using SUBSTITUTE.

 

[Guest]

Fred,

Thank you for your response. In this case I am not conerned about the
cosmetics, but I have many years worth of workbooks generated in Excel 2000
that contain TEXT functions with lower case "e". I just recently upgraded to
Excel 2003, and now I get a #VALUE! error for each of these functions. The
results of these equations are used to generate versioned code for production
release, so my ability to regenerate existing versions is now broken unless I
go back to Excel 2000.

If I have to, I can modify new versions to use an upper case "e" (although
it will not pass a diff with the existing version), but none of my existing
workbooks will function without modification. I have searched on both the MS
site and Google, but I cannot find any reference to this change. Any
information is appreciated.

Thanks,
Cory

 

[Bruce Sinclair]

This may be more work than you want to go to, but you could create the result
using TEXT, then convert "E" to "e" using SUBSTITUTE.

... as to why that might have changed, when I see "e" i think the
mathematical symbol as in the inverse of ln. I am guessing (!) that it was
changed to distinguish it from that, as my HP calculator has