Forum Discussion
Squaring with preceding minus
Hello together! When I put "=-5^2" in a cell, it gives me 25 as a result. Am I doing something wrong? Is that a joke? Is that the standard Excel behaviour?
In addition to above comments. Confusion is since negation and substruction have the same sign "-". Actually negation has higher priority, you may check in Google Sheets or in any other spreadsheet / data modelling software.
In school math we don't separate negation and substruction assuming the latest by default.
Not to beat a dead horse but I thought this was interesting discussion and to further support the discussion you can see in the image below how Excel does treat negation and subtration differently:
First discussion I seen about that is about 25 years ago, but I lost the link. Anyway, that's with any data modelling software, e.g.
Google Sheets
SmartSheets
Rows:
etc.