A student from a few semesters ago stopped by my office today. She was having trouble doing something in excel...the person before her had it working, but had since then graduated.
I took a look at the previous person's equation and the new equation she wrote: they looked the same. I tried out a similar equation, but different, and came up with the same wrong results. Well, hmm. Before getting to much farther into it, I checked for spaces. ...those spaces at the end of words in an Excel cell that you can't see but that make all your formulas wrong? There they were. Remove the invisible spaces and ta-da! It worked! Fixed in under 10 minutes.
I apparently saved her from having to work from 2am to 5am coming up here in a few days. Now, she spent two hours trying to trouble shoot the problem so I'm not sure I was a huge net help, but it would have been boring work and she appreciated it a ton.
I've noticed the invisible spaces tripping people up a lot more lately. They've always been on my radar, but I check for them a lot faster these days.
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