IF/THEN is my most used conditional. I couldn't write without it. If anything I could use it more than I do!
I start with a Condition or a “When”. Think of it as a Bud on a branch that sprouts and creates several new branches as the tree grows. The IF’s are a way of navigating through the branches to the Fruit. Like any Fruit Tree one must prune back the branches in order to improve the quality of the Fruit. You can only feed the Crop with so many E’s and O’s, Sums, High-Lows and Statistics before the Crop is a Bust.
Yogi said it best. “When you come to a Fork in the Road, Take it.” I found myself at this Fork a few months back. One of the prongs said “Where?”. So far, the IFs are pretty simple. “Did this spot or group of spots contain a winning number?”. The best part about the Where is that the Tree does not have to grow new branches. Instead the Fruit migrates from branch to branch and the IF is Yes or No to the Point. The Crickets are loving the Tree so far and have made giant leaps searching for the right combinations of “Points”. Statistics and Math can wait their turn in the Selection Process. They are now on standby if needed. I am still pretty fond of a couple of those Filters so there is a place for them as a Last Step after I pick the Fruit.
Anybody who works as hard as you do has my respect. And I respect your wish for privacy and understand the "quiet crickets" attitude. Not easy when you see something and want to shout it out, get some opinions and see if others see the same. Hard to keep the crickets quiet in that case. But somehow you do.
Thank you for the compliment. It been an interesting journey.
Years ago I'd put up first run stuff. Not anymore. Like most, I figure the stuff we see is something the poster is ready to kick aside, or has made improvements on, or is more focused on the process and function, far beyond the basic how to.
That is a summary of my own actions so far. I have to admit that I have posted ideas that I had already evaluated as another version of “Let’s Make a Deal”, hoping to find someone that might try to read the “Tea Leaves”. Also, there was some need to get a few strokes for the effort. OK, I have admitted it but, in my defense, I was giving the idea a last chance by asking this Forum to “give it a try” hoping that someone could use the Tool better than I. A couple of strokes came from the brief discussion but the rest was a chorus of Crickets leading to my Avatar (Thanks to HarvestMoon). And that was back in the “Good Old Days” before the invasion of the Arrogant Under Achievers filling the pages with Conspiracy Theory and Name Calling. Even been sucked into the Name calling myself by the arrogance.
Then every time Excel is mentioned I think about getting it. I've been working without it so long now it slips my mind. But after using the alternatives, I know Excel is the best.
I’m an Excel Guy, because it is the only program that I know. It is both a blessing and a curse. The Blessing is that I can think about the Matrix in Excel. It is a Curse because it offers an “On the Fly” potential to explode at any time. The chief culprit is the address function that does not use a formula to set it’s location, when a Column or Row is inserted or the Range Reference is moved. Anyway,
I am pretty sure that other programs can do this better than Excel. Excel can do pretty much all of the calculations and respond with Colors and highlights to certain Values in the result. It Can update Graphs. Being a Stepper, my VB skills are limited. Most of the Macros that I Step Out run in Screen Update mode so that I can watch the Kaleidoscope flicker. That’s one from the Curse Side. I have watched a few videos of another software that produced an animated video of a Combination of the sine waves created by a spinning circle with a small spinning circle attached. Excel can not do that with ease. There are some Pie Charts that appear to spin but they are very limited.
Location, Location, Location!