Algebra

I was driving from Montreal to Halifax this summer. The speed limit on the highway in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia is 110km/h, but I've heard that this is + or - 10 km/h, therefore cops don't stop you if you are driving up to 120km/h.

Anyway, I was driving and driving (it's a 13h drive). At one point, my whole family was sleeping, so I had nothing better to do but to think. I thought of many silly things, but one of them was math related. As you might realize, I wanted to get to Halifax as quickly as possile, therefore was trying to figure out how much time I would save if I went 5km/h faster than I was at the time.

Part of my job is being a spreadsheet monkey that analyzes or creates mountains of data. One of the things I love to do is find quick or elegant ways of doing things in Excel. Very commonly, I have to do is to take a cash flow stream that totals one number and "scale" it so that it totals a different number, but keep the relative amounts the same. For example, suppose you are budgeting the sales trip expenses for your department for next year. Usually you would start from this year's expenses, say they were $30,000 .