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Announcing LET

Chris_Gross's avatar
Chris_Gross
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Mar 17, 2020
Have you ever had to repeat the same expression multiple times within a formula, created a mega formula or wished that you had a way to reuse portions of your formula for easier consumption? With the...
Updated Jul 23, 2020
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PeterBartholomew1's avatar
PeterBartholomew1
Silver Contributor
Sep 29, 2020

lori_m 

Thanks for the input.  I confess that my IT background (I was raised on FORTRAN) is not sufficient to make me the ideal person to judge the relative merits of candidate syntax.  What I am sure of is that there is a need to be able to pipe a sequence of values through a calculation and collect the results.  This should provide a means of bypassing pairwise lifting in circumstances where it is not applicable.

Another thought I had was to introduce the UNIX pipe operator to feed values sequentially (is that what your MAP does?), so the formula might read

= LET( p, | period,
  INDEX(flow, p) + IF(p=1, 10000, INDEX(Balance, p-1)))

where the operator "|" provides the instruction to break up the array.  The values would be recombined into a result array when p goes out of scope.