It's all in how you say it

During online training the other day, we were doing formulas in Excel and the trainer was trying to tell us to make sure, that when we were using IF (a logical test) formulas, that we had to make sure to give the either/or option responses in "those things you do in the air when you're having a conversation". I'm pretty sure she meant quotation marks - as was everyone else in the training judging by the number of murmurred assents.