The right, left, and middle functions aren’t very glamorous, but they are workhorses. I often use them together, but not always. They’re useful for date handling, and for interpreting MARC records or other formatted data, as well as for proofreading,… Read moreSpecific functions: Right and Left

As I said before, the concatenate function can be used in a great many useful ways, and one of those ways is to make it easier to sort. There are two things which often annoy me when I’m doing frequent… Read moreConcatenate function for sorting

Even if you do have column headers, once you scroll down more than a screen you can’t see them anymore. Unless, that is, you freeze them. Freezing allows you to specify any number of currently showing rows and/or columns to… Read moreFreezing rows and columns: Basic how-to

In response to the last post, one commenter asked whether the name of a column was the name of the group of cells in the column, or the name of each individual cell in the column. The answer is…both!

When you’re making a detailed list, column headers are extremely important. It’s possible to do without them, but after four columns or so I usually find myself studying the contents and saying “Now, WHAT did this column contain? Likewise, when… Read moreWhy to name columns

Ah, concatenate. How I love you! I use you for proofreading. I use you to generate statistics. I use you to write code. I use you to enable easy sorting. And, of course, I use you for formatting text. As… Read moreSpecific functions: Concatenate

Sooner or later, if you have a long string of text, you might want to actually do something with it. There are all sorts of things that can be done with a string of text! But if you go browsing… Read moreFavorite functions: Text manipulation

So what happens if the brief descriptions in the list of possible functions isn’t enough? Most spreadsheets provide some sort of additional description and/or help file to, in theory, help someone use their functions. These help files are usually very… Read moreFunctions: Help files

So, now that you know about functions, how do you use them? First off, if you already know the name of the function, and what parameters it takes, you can just type it in the same way you’d type in… Read moreFunctions: Finding the one you want

Functions are one of the big things that separate a spreadsheet from a paper ledger. I mean, you can do arithmetic functions on a piece of paper pretty easily. You can use highlighters or different pens to change the “format”… Read moreFunctions