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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

I am no excel wizard (have been using Libreoffice for a decade now) but I guess you can do that already (in it's own row)

  =IF(EXACT(ValueA;ValueB); ValueA; "Mismatch!")

So you basically just compare two other rows (which you can hide if you like) and if they are exactly the same you display the value, otherwise you display an error.

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Thank-you. Yes, it's already there in Excel.

The next step may be Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY), so even N nearly duplicate formulae for N rows is N-1 more times than needed.

It's not so bad with one column, but after rearranging a dozen columns and copy-pasting some corrections, the question becomes, "Is everything still working okay, or do I need to skip lunch?"

There's ways around, like a `CURRENT_ROW()` function. That makes it generic.

Understandably, it can be a hassle to type extra functions all the time. Boilerplate for one-liners isn't fun; the whole point is rapid iteration and prototyping.

Just saying, if a model is important enough to keep around and maintain, put in some pragmatic checks--just like your example.

If I'm doing a lot of moving around of things, and wanting to keep more complicated formulas working, I'll usually just use named ranges for my own sanity (and as a convenience for whoever may need to take over a workbook after me) - eg, ```=SUMIF(TransactionProductSold,"Product1",TransactionAmount)```

Then color code the row based on that output

> Then color code the row based on that output

Pretty useful! https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/scalc/01/0512...

Exactly

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