Practical guides, how-tos and comparisons to get the most out of our free online tools.
2,000 words is 8 pages double-spaced, 4 single-spaced and 3.3 in a dense report layout. "How many pages" is a question about the layout, not about the text — and the 250-word page has a history.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
Delivery speed decides a talk's length more than the script does. At 170 words a minute the same text takes 7 min 04 s; at 110 it takes 10 min 55 s — and only one of those fits a ten-minute slot.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
3d6 and 1d20 have almost the same average and nothing else in common. Against a target of 12 the three dice are better, against 18 they are five times worse — and the calculator gives the exact figures rather than a simulation.
Lena Hoffmann · 4 min read
336 cells, 192 of them boy and 144 girl. The chart is not even a fair coin, and the real ratio at birth is about 51 % boys — which is the whole measurement this article has to offer.
Antonio Delgado · 4 min read
A women's EU 38 is a 245 mm foot; a men's EU 38 is a 235 mm foot. The printed number is a label, not a measurement — and on the children's US scale it goes backwards, where a 1 is bigger than a 13.
Aisha Karim · 4 min read
The population barely enters the sample size formula. What does enter it is the margin of error, and halving that margin quadruples the survey — from 385 people to 1,537.
Lena Hoffmann · 4 min read
Splitting a workbook writes one .xlsx per sheet, named after the tab. It carries the values across and not the formulas — which is the right default when the point is to send one department its own tab.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
Run the balance over 1,836 charts and 83.1 % of them have at least one element with no weight at all. An empty element is the norm, not a signature.
Antonio Delgado · 4 min read
Two sides both priced at -110 imply 52.4 % each. That adds to 104.8 %, and the 4.8 points that should not exist are the margin — visible the moment you convert the odds.
Camille Laurent · 4 min read
A cell can hold a formula and no cached result. A reader that skips empty cells throws the formula away with them — and says the file has none. One parsing option separates the two cases.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
OpenDocument makes styles.xml optional. Several readers demand it and reject the whole document without it — "Cannot find file styles.xml in zip" on a file that is not broken.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
JSON takes your header text as a key exactly as written. XML cannot — its names may not hold spaces, parentheses or a leading digit — so they are normalised, and knowing how prevents a surprise downstream.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
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