Utilizing Excel's turing capabilities to create Conway's 'Game of Life'
The Background It's been said with Lambda (and LET and a wealth of functions in 365) Excel has become 'turing-complete'. To quote the article linked below: "You can now, in principle, write any computation in the Excel formula language." https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ultimatae-excel-worksheet-function/ The Challenge I thought it would be fun to create Conway's 'Game of Life' in Excel 365 to see how far I could push things. Conway's Game of Life - Wikipedia The rules are simple: A 'cell' has up to 8 adjacent cells (less if the cell is on the edge of the board). A 'neighbor' is a cell with a 1 while a 'dead' cell is empty. An 18x18 board Multiple iterations Bigger boards! more (it's relaxing to create new shapes and designs) The Approach My first thought was to use MAKEARRAY because I could use 'r' and 'c' coordinates and there would be no stacking. I devised a recursive function that worked for 1 iteration but failed on subsequent iterations because the use of TAKE/DROP was slowly shrinking the board! The revised approach is essentialy a recursive MAP that uses 3 arrays: the input matrix, the 'r' array (row numbers) and the 'c' array (column numbers). It's my way of using r/c without using MAKEARRAY. For Discussion I welcome any improvements to the existing function and any different approaches someone may have to creating Conway's Game of Life. Conway Lambda follows: Conway =LAMBDA(matrix, iterations, IF( iterations = 0, matrix, Conway( LET( height, ROWS(matrix), width, COLUMNS(matrix), r_arr, SEQUENCE(height) * SEQUENCE(, width, 1, 0), c_arr, SEQUENCE(height, , 1, 0) * SEQUENCE(, width), CheckNeighbors, LAMBDA(lattice, r, c, LET( RCx, LAMBDA(row, col, IFERROR(CHOOSECOLS(CHOOSEROWS(matrix, row), col), 0) ), N, RCx(r - 1, c), NE, RCx(r - 1, c + 1), E, RCx(r, c + 1), SE, RCx(r + 1, c + 1), S, RCx(r + 1, c), SW, RCx(r + 1, c - 1), W, RCx(r, c - 1), NW, RCx(r - 1, c - 1), compass, VSTACK(N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW), neighbors, SUM(compass), IF( AND(lattice = 0, neighbors = 3), 1, IF( AND(lattice = 1, OR(neighbors = 2, neighbors = 3)), 1, 0 ) ) ) ), MAP(matrix, r_arr, c_arr, CheckNeighbors) ), iterations - 1 ) ) )How can I know if I am using Outlook.com or Office 365 Outlook?
How can I know if I am using Outlook.com or Office 365 Outlook? I thought that Office 365 was only online and accessed by a browser. I have a stand-alone Outlook product but the options are only either Office 365 Outlook or Outlook.com, with emphasis on the ".com". So which one should I pick? In the past, all one had to do is click on help -> about and you could see the name of the product and the version, but this is not the case today. When I use a Microsoft tool called "Power Automate" there are clearly two separate options I have to pick from where one is implementing Outlook.com and the other is implementing Office 365 Outlook. Apparently, I have to know which one I am using.Is it time to upgrade from Microsoft Office? Everything you need to know.
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Office 365 - Excel 2016: Find feature no longer highlights text
I am currently searching a very large file for keywords and there is only a slight outline of the row number and cell meeting my search criteria. Previously, the cell or word would be highlighted to easily identify them. I am hoping the Find feature did not permanently stop highlighting text/cell. Is there a setting to change this?
