confident a lot of you may have designed a spreadsheet similar to this just before: you’ve received a table of information; amongst the columns during this table contains a system which references a span of columns within the exact table. The number of columns you need to reference may change over time as requirements change. How do you you build this table in such a way that the number of columns can be changed without breaking the method that references them? walk through a somewhat contrived but simple example to demonstrate the issue. Say I’m a real estate investor and I’m tracking a list of houses I’m interested in purchasing. I’m a demanding and detail oriented buyer so I want to know the square footage of your individual rooms with the dwelling. Based on this information, I want to calculate the count of rooms during the dwelling as well as the total square feet for the rooms combined. The table might look something similar to this: for the “#Rooms” column looks something like this: Table1[[#This Row],[SqFt-Room1]:[SqFt-Room3]] ) let’s say I want to add a new house, but this new house has four rooms. Simple, just add a column,
win 7 home basic x86, right? Not so fast; depending on how we add that column our formulas for “#Rooms” and “Ttl Sq. ft.” may not update as expected. let’s say I’ve changed focus to small condominiums and no longer have a need for the “Room3” column. If I attempt to delete it, then my formulas will break. How do we avoid this? one trick I use in such situations. It may not be the best answer, but I’ll share it with you here and if others have suggestions to offer you can add them to the comments. add an extra “dummy” column prior to and after the span as end caps, and refer to those columns in your formulas. Using our real estate example,
buy microsoft office 2010 sale, I would add a column previously “SqFt-Room1” called “RoomsStart” and a person after “SqFt-Room3” called “RoomsEnd”, like so: keep these columns empty and never put information in them. This is important because otherwise my COUNT and SUM formulas may return the wrong results. Then I’d highlight the columns a different shade (this is totally optional but I personally like the visual effect of marking off the start and end for the span) and resize them to something very small so they are out of your way for the most part, like so: can hide the columns if you so desire. Then I’d update my formulas so that they referenced these columns instead, like so: I want to add a fourth room, I select the “RoomsEnd” column and right-click \ Insert and I get a new column which I can name “SqFt-Room4”. This new column will automatically be included in my COUNT and SUM calculations. Similarly,
office Home And Student 32 bit, if I ever get rid of “SqFt-Room4”,
windows 7 enterprise 64bit key, I don’t have to worry about breaking any of my formulas. It may not be the most elegant solution,
win 7 professional 32 bit, but it gives me a virtually worry-free way to reference a changing number of columns in my table.