because the square whose first side is and second side is is to be regarded as having the opposite orientation as the square whose first side is and whose second side is . This is why we only need to sum over expressions , with ; for example: . The exterior product allows higher-degree differential forms to be built out of lower-degree ones, in much the same way that the cross product in vector calculus allows one to compute the area vector of a parallelogram from vectors pointing up the two sides. Alternating also implies that , in the same way that the cross product of parallel vectors, whose magnitude is the area of the parallelogram spanned by those vectors, is zero. In higher dimensions, if any two of the indices , ..., are equal, in the same way that the "volume" enclosed by a parallelotope whose edge vectors are linearly dependent is zero.