Operators

Operators are fundamental building blocks of formulas and may be applied to one or more formula inputs. Operators fall into the following types grouped by precedence in descending reading order (left to right then top to bottom):

type	operator
logical	= < <= > >= <>
text	&
number	+ - * / ^ % -(unary)
any	+(unary)
reference	: , @ # () (space)

Non-reference operators convert references to values. Unary plus is the simplest such operator being just an identity operator preserving value types. Arithmetic operators convert text and booleans to numbers - note the order of precedence for negation is non standard for example 0-2^2 and -2^2 are not equal. With logical operators, two numbers are designated equal up to fifteen significant digits and blanks equate to missing arguments, empty strings, zero, false and some other exceptional values. The text concatenation operator (&) converts numbers and logicals to their text equivalents.

Reference operators raise an invalid formula exception with any non-reference operands. Range :, union , and intersection (space) are binary operators taking reference only arguments. Spill # and implicit intersection operator @ are unary operators taking reference or value operands. Function call () is a n-ary operator with first operand as function reference (udf, xlm or xll) and optional comma separated operands.