Abstract

Sometimes you need to present quota changes in a simple way. You can achieve this with fractions:

Example: Miller, Smith, and Schulz form a joint heirship. Smith dies without an heir. His quota will be distributed. Schulz also dies. His widows will receive 2/3 of his quota, his only child will get 1/3. Please note that you need to enter this as =1/3 * 2/3 resp. =1/3 * 1/3 whereby the first 1/3 represents Schulz' original quota.

17 Camels Trick

A father left 17 camels to his three sons and, according to the will, the eldest son should be given a half of all camels, the middle son the one-third part and the youngest son the one-ninth. This is hard to do, but a wise man helped the sons: he added his own camel, the oldest son took 18/2 = 9 camels, the second son took 18/3 = 6 camels, the third son 18/9 = 2 camels and the wise man took his own camel and went away.

Now we can see easily what’s wrong with this will:

The quotas do not add up to 100% but only to 94.44%. The sons' shares are too low by 1/34, 1/51, and 1/153. The father should have given his youngest son one-sixth of all camels, then all parts would have added up to 100%. The parts would not have resulted in whole camels but the sons could have agreed to compensation payments.

Download

This task you can easily solve with Excel worksheet formulas. Use Excel’s internal fraction format as parameter for the TEXT function:

Please read my Disclaimer.

Quota_Change_as_Fraction.xlsx [16 KB Excel file, open and use at your own risk]

You can also use the user defined function sbNRN:

Please read my Disclaimer.

Quota_Change_as_Fraction.xlsm [23 KB Excel file, open and use at your own risk]