An Interactive Use of the Lanchester Combat Model

Technical Comments on Excel

4. Tricks for Working Around the Scroll Bar’s Limitations

While the Scroll Bar is a great tool, it has some limitations. In particular, its domain is defined by nonnegative integers, and incremental changes occur only in whole numbers. However using both positive and negative numbers and/or including decimals are relatively simple. Consider the case where you have assigned control of a Scroll Bar to a cell, B1. If the cell’s domain is [0, 100], then getting it to go from [-50, 50] can be done through assigning cell C1 as =B1-50. If decimals are preferred too, then the cell assignment for D1 can be =(B1-50)/10.

This can be seen in the "How To" on getting Battle Factors to decimal representation, found in the cell area J46 of the Lanchester Excel worksheet.