Monday, July 14, 2014

Nine things everyone should know how to do with a spreadsheet

Macworld has a nice article, Nine things everyone should know how to do with a spreadsheet. I learned a few things, like #8. They show examples for MS Excel, iWork Numbers and Google Sheets.

  • 5 contains a mistake. Numbers does indeed allow you to name ranges. In particular it does it automatically for whole columns or rows based on the header name. Also, one of the things I really like about Numbers is that each sheet is just a canvas and you put tables and charts (and potentially other objects) on it. This makes much more sense to me than embedding a chart in a table as Excel does. It also means that Tables can have names that formulas can reference. (I did learn that Excel allows you to name ranges).

1 comment:

Richard said...

Basic but good info in these tips.

I am not a fan of merged cells because I know that people use spreadsheets for two or three competing reasons, 1. contain data, 2. manipulate data, 3. display data in a human friendly format. Nothing like merged cells to stop me from taking that data and putting it somewhere else for manipulation. I think with spreadsheets those three reason can be kept separate.

I liked the other comment that warned people not to use a spreadsheet as a database. I think that is an advanced topic vs. the suggestions in the post.

Finally, goodness knows I love building complicated models and manipulating data in spreadsheets to learn new things, but when it comes time to present the data, think carefully. No one but a handful of savants can make sense instantly out a table of numbers. Use good, thoughtful charts to learn the relationships in the data. I am a big fan of Tableau for this. (steps off of soapbox, sorry about that)