positive a lot of you could have constructed a spreadsheet like this before: you’ve received a table of information; among the columns within this table is made up of a formula which references a span of columns from the very same 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 system 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 the individual rooms within the dwelling. Based on this information, I want to calculate the count of rooms in the dwelling as well as the total square feet in the rooms combined. The table might look something like this: for the “#Rooms” column looks something similar to 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,
microsoft office 2010 pro key, 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 particular 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 just before and after the span as end caps, and refer to those columns in your formulas. Using our real estate example,
microsoft office 2010 Home And Business 64 bit key, I would add a column in advance of “SqFt-Room1” called “RoomsStart” and 1 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 from the span) and resize them to something very small so they are out for the 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,
windows 7 home premium x64, like so: I want to add a fourth room,
win 7 professional 64 bit, 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, if I ever get rid of “SqFt-Room4”,
cheap microsoft windows 7 serial key, I don’t have to worry about breaking any of my formulas. It may not be the most elegant solution, but it gives me a virtually worry-free way to reference a changing number of columns in my table.