These Numbers Just Don’t Add Up





Getting Right Down To It

This cartoon was originally captioned, “Yes, I can see that you added these numbers up, but they still don’t, you know. . .add up.” It’s a fine caption, but if brevity is indeed wit, that line is less than witty.

You see, in general, you only have a few seconds to get a cartoon across to a reader, so any shortcut you can take (implying background, simplifying scenery, pruning a caption) helps a lot.

But this one was a stumper. I couldn’t get past setting it up with “added these numbers up,” that is, until I was tinkering with my budget later that day.

I was using the auto sum function when suddenly the above caption came into sharp focus. An Excel-lent improvement, you could say.

3 Comments ▼

Mark Anderson Mark Anderson's cartoons appear in publications including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review. His business cartoons are available for licensing at his website, Andertoons.com.

3 Reactions
  1. Yeah, the final caption is FAR better 😉

  2. Business Valuations

    I agree, the new caption is better. There are times I wish control+z worked in the real world. Cool pic and caption.

  3. Martin Lindeskog

    Mark,

    Do you know where I find the Greek alphabet letter Sigma (used in Excel as autosum symbol) on MacBook keyboard?





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