Plane Spotters!

After spotting planes myself this afternoon, I went to the rooftop pool/bar and started snapping photos as planes took off from the airport and headed my way.

I saw a chap with his computer ... and he stood up and started looking through his binoculars. I then noticed that he was locating and looking at planes that seemed to be in random parts of the sky! I then noticed that he was running plane spotting software ... After that I noticed another man, other side of the pool, doing the same. This chap had HUGE bins though!! Take a look at the photos ... I threw in a pigeon too. By the way, zoom in on the bird and it's feathers are suave!

And here's a photo I took and cropped earlier! It's Emirates' aeroplane A6-EMM, a Boeing 777-31H that first flew in 1999.

DW

How did this happen?

Excel 2007 with a worksheet 180,000 lines deep ... only 5 columns.

I prepared a data profile that included classifying the data and then using SUM to add up the values.

I prepared another analysis as preparation to draw a histogram and then used SUM to add up the values.

Then  I created a very simple IF statement to check that total 1 =  total 2 ... they didn't agree. For some reason, although ALL values have only two decimal places, when added together, total 1 could be expanded to ...247.900883 while total 2 could be expanded to 247.90003.

As a workaround I amended the IF statement:

=IF(INT(A1)=INT(B1),"Reconciled","Error") ... that worked

and so did this:

=IF(ROUND(A1,3)=ROUND(B1,3),"Reconciled","Error") but =IF(ROUND(A1,4)=ROUND(B1,4),"Reconciled","Error") did NOT work, for what is probably an obvious reason!

 

Duncan Williamson