What does ^ do!?

[MartyA]

My knowledge of excel is pretty basic and i can't find any useful help
anywhere.

I'm trying to port a financial calculator written in excel to flash.
One of the calculations in excel is =(1+J5)^(1/12)-1
In excel this returns a value such as; 0.005163318

The ported code in flash returns a single bit (0 or 1). From what I can
gather in pretty much every programming language ^ is a binary shift
function. I have no idea why a financial calulator would be converting
values to bits, which brings me to the conculsion that the ^ opperator
must have a different meaning in excel

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks in advance
Marty

 

[Chip Pearson]

The ^ character is exponentiation. E.g.,

3^2 = 9


--
Cordially,
Chip Pearson
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Pearson Software Consulting, LLC
www.cpearson.com


"MartyA" <[email protected]>
wrote in message
news:[email protected]...

 

[cvolkert]

The ^ in Excel is to take a value to a power. Example: =3^2 would be 3
squared and would result in a value of 9. The example you had in your
formula converts an annual interest rate the the monthly compounded
rate. Hope this helps, Chad

 

[MartyA]

The ^ in Excel is to take a value to a power. Example: =3^2 would be
squared and would result in a value of 9. The example you had in you
formula converts an annual interest rate the the monthly compounde
rate. Hope this helps, Chad

Chad, you've solved my problem. Thanks heaps!

Mart