[Dclug] Spread Sheets Again!

[kate]

I'm pretty much a *nix noob, but I can tell you what I primarily use
spreadsheets for:

1. Quick/easy formatting of charts: If I'm making up, say, my class
schedule, and I want to use my own format rather than using a calendar
program, which might not have the fields I need, I just pop open
Gnumeric and make use of the pretty colors :-)

2. I also use spreadsheets at work for basic arithmetic, e.g. adding up
a column of numbers. That way, if I make a typing mistake, I can track
it (which can't easily be done with a calculator). 

I'm told spreadsheets are capable of amazing mathematical feats, but I
really have no use for those in my humble daily existence.

Kate




On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 15:40 -0500, Alan McConnell wrote:
> Assembled Wisdom!
> 
> I had always thought that the essence of spreadsheetery
> was: first, to load "comparable" data in say Cols B and C
> (rows running from say 1 to 50) and then prescribing
> operations -- averaging, maybe -- on the numbers in
> Cols B and C -- row by row -- and having these averages
> put in column D.
> 
> I HAVE JUST LEARNED HOW TO DO THAT.
> 
> The gnumeric manual was no help, although after learning how
> to do it, from a kindly H.S. friend living at present in
> CT, I have found where some reference in the GNumeric manual,
> on p 112(!) can be interpreted as giving a tip.
> 
> My question:  do any of you use spread-sheets?  what are they
> good for?  Given a text file containing e.g. state by state
> census data:
> 	Alaska      200,000   300,000
>         Arizona     3,000,000   4,000,000     etc
> with census data in 2000 in field B and in 2010 in field C,
> I or any of you could whip out a bash or Perl or awk script, or
> even a LISP program to compute the difference in the numbers,
> and the % increase.   To do this in e.g. Gnumeric was very
> difficult to learn.
> 
> But maybe there is arcana that escapes me.  Maybe I'm thinking
> about spreadsheets and their use in totally the wrong way.
> 
> Comments?   TIA.
> 
> Alan
>