certain many of you could have developed a spreadsheet similar to this previous to: you have obtained a table of info; one of the many columns in this table consists of a formula which references a span of columns with the similar 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 in the individual rooms from the dwelling. Based on this information, I want to calculate the count of rooms in the dwelling as well as the total square feet from the rooms combined. The table might look something like this: for the “#Rooms” column looks something similar to this: Table1[[#This Row],
Windows 7 Home Basic X64,[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, 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,
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 Product Key, 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 ahead of and after the span as end caps, and refer to those columns in your formulas. Using our real estate example, 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 of your span) and resize them to something very small so they are out in 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,
Office 2010 Professional, like so: I want to add a fourth room,
Office Pro Plus 2007 Activation Key, 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”,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, 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.