Boolean Operators Missing From Cell Expressions In Excel?

(how's that for a geeky title)

Okay, the simple excel function i wanted to teach someone to write:

How would you write that as a cell function?

I haven't done much excel lately. Here's how I thought it would be written:

=IF(B12 >=1986 AND B12 <= 2000,1,0) <-- Nope!!!

How about:

=IF(B12 >=1986 && B12 <= 2000,1,0) <-- Uh-uh!! No siree!!

(i was still refusing to look up help at this point...)

Forget it... i'll nest the logic...

=IF(B12 >=1986, IF(B12 <= 2000), 1 ,0) ,0) <-- Yes this worked. But...

Yuck. I mean... honestly!!

So I tried...

=IF(B12 BETWEEN (1986, 2000), 1, 0) <-- Doesn't work
=IF(B12 IN (1986...2000), 1, 0) <-- Doesn't work

(also tried with square brackets, curly brackets, angle brackets, pipe symbols, the phoenician alphabet, a donkey's leg, a bat's wing....)

Looked in help... and oh my god how lispy is this:

=IF(AND(B12 >=1986, B12 <= 2000), 1, 0)

How am i supposed to teach my frail elderly aunt to grok that?

It's elegant from the computer's point of view... it's an expression tree... i'd enjoy writing a program to parse that, i know i would... but teaching a regular human to read it, use it, debug it, maintain it, trust it, tweak it, share it, co-opt it, .... never.

This is a symptom of excel decimating the competition a long time ago and then stagnating. Yes: the dodo effect.

If excel were a version 2 product, I'd say "hey that's pretty good", but we're talking about version 11 here. They should've allowed cell functions like this: "= IF (B12 >=1986 AND B12 <= 2000, 1, 0) " long long ago. Operators... operators... not just functions. Lisp had it back in 1902. ah forget it. I wonder how wikiCalc handles cell functions? or spreadsheets.google.com?

 

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