Simple statistics: counting rows and columns

Sometimes, when working with spreadsheets, you need to know how many rows or columns are in a table, without particularly needing to know anything about their contents.

Simple statistics: Counting

One thing that people often want to know, especially if they’re storing lists of things in spreadsheets, is “how many” there are of something.

Fortunately, there are a fair number of ways to get a spreadsheet to tell you how many it has of something. Unfortunately this means it can be pretty confusing when trying to pick the right one for your needs. So, here’s a quick guide as to what functions are commonly available, and what they do. In the next few weeks I’ll talk about them in more detail, including how they overlap and how to emulate one with another. Then I’ll give some examples of how you might use them in the workplace or in daily life.

Example: GPA as a weighted average

As promised last week, today I’m going to talk about how to use a spreadsheet to calculate weighted averages in general, and Grade Point Averages (GPA) in particular.*

A weighted average is just any average where some values are more important. Values with greater importance are said to be weighted more heavily. A GPA is the perfect example of that.

Favorite functions: Simple statistics

There’s a lot of pretty amazing things that a trained statistician can tell about a set of numbers, given the right statistical tools. I, however, am not a trained statistician, and neither are most people.

For most people, there’s really only three things that they want to know about most things: how many, how much, and the average. Fortunately, in addition to a dizzying array of tools to perform higher level statistics, every spreadsheet will provide basic tools to answer these three questions.

Formatting elements: Alignment (Nifty tricks)

First off, in honor of spring I just want to say that it’s time to…

Making geometric figures (a nifty trick with text orientation and cell merging)

Last week I promised that I’d discuss how to use text orientation in spreadsheets to make regular geometric figures.

To start off with, a regular geometric figure (also known as a regular polygon) is any figure where all the sides are the same length, and all the angles are the same size. A square is a regular polygon, but a rectangle isn’t because the sides aren’t all the same.

Formatting elements: Alignment (About direction and orientation)

This week I’m going to discuss the last two aspects of alignment: text orientation, and text direction. It’s easy to get these two confused, but if you don’t remember which is which it’s not like it hurts anything to try one. I often end up trying both to see which will look better, anyway.