Episode: 1625
Title: HPR1625: 40 - LibreOffice Calc - Other Functions
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1625/hpr1625.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:00:06

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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to another exciting episode
of Hacker Public Radio in our ongoing series on Libra Office Calc.
And we have looked over the last number of weeks at discussions of the functions, first of
all the financial functions, and then the statistical functions in some depth.
I don't propose to go into the remaining types of function in that kind of depth.
Those were the two that I thought had the most payoff for the largest number of people.
But doing that with all the functions we'd be here for another year, and I don't think
that's a good use of my time, but I want to do kind of a little survey of just some of
the other things, so you know what's there.
And if you followed the stuff that I've already done, you've already got a pretty good idea
of how to use functions.
So I don't think we really need to go too much more into all of these details.
Remember that if you need to know more about them, Google is your friend.
And I would just mention that most of these functions also exist in Excel.
So if you find a site that explains how it works in Microsoft Excel, it probably works
pretty much the same in Libra Office Calc.
Now, first thing I want to look at is the database functions.
These functions are all very similar.
They take three arguments, database, database field, and search criteria.
Each one has a definition.
And in the show notes, I'm going to have a link to the Libra Office help site that is
going to explain more about all of these database functions.
So database itself is the cell range defining the database.
Database field specifies the column where the function operates after the search criteria,
the first parameter is applied, and the data rows are selected.
To reference a column by means of the column header name, place quotation marks around
the header name.
Search criteria is the cell range containing search criteria.
If you write several criteria in one row, they are connected by an AND.
If you write the criteria in different rows, they are connected by OR.
These cells in the search criteria range will be ignored.
Many of these functions support regular expressions as search criteria.
So in brief, these functions let you do a query through the search criteria and pull
the rows that correspond to that query, then do something with them, but something you
can do.
Well, you can do an average, account, max, min, standard deviation, sum, variance.
Those are some of the things you might want to do there.
Now, the next group I want to look at, information functions.
These functions let you ask questions about the contents of cells in your spreadsheet.
In general, you can imagine a long column of numbers and wanting to know something about
each of the numbers.
So in an adjacent column, you put one of the information functions, pointed at the first
column, and dragged to fill the column.
If the number in the first column matches what you're looking for, the function will
return a value of true.
Here are the some of the things you can test for.
Is blank, is the cell blank, is error, is error, is error, is error, does the cell contain
an error value?
Is even underscore add, is the number even?
Is formula, does the cell contain a formula?
ISNA returns a true value, if the value in the cell is equal to hash and slash A.
Is non-text, returns a true value, if the value in the cell is not text.
Is number, returns true, if the value is a number.
Is odd underscore ADD, is the number odd?
Is ref, returns true, if the value is a reference, and is text, returns true, if the value
is text.
So that's some of the information functions.
Then there's the logical functions.
These are functions where you can apply logical tests of some kind and get back an answer.
For example, maybe you want to know about any rows where the value in column A is greater
than 10, and the value in column B is less than 15.
These are logical tests.
The form of these functions is to specify as many of these logical tests as you like.
Up to 30, actually, and return a true if all tests are passed.
So imagine you have two columns of numbers, A and B, and you want to apply the example
test that I gave.
In column C, enter the function, and in cell C1, and in logical value, 1, enter the test,
C1, greater than 10, and in logical value 2, enter the test, B1, less than 15.
Click OK, then drag to fill column C. This will test all the rows that you have filled.
And here are the logical functions of this kind.
Returns true if all arguments are true, or returns true if any argument is true, and
XOR, exclusive OR, returns true if an odd number of arguments is true.
If that last one seems a little weird to you, and XOR can seem a little bit weird, as
a side knight, it's one of those things that you run into constantly when you're studying
cryptography.
I would say consult a book on logic and see what exactly is meant by exclusive OR.
I'm just telling you it's here.
So also within logical functions, you have some interesting functions here for if-then
calculations.
These functions all in general apply a test, then allow you to specify two values.
One if the test is true, the other if the test is false.
So these are if, all right, IF.
For this function, you need to give it the test as the first argument.
For example, if the value in column A is positive, enter one thing, if it is negative,
enter something else.
If error, here the test is built into the function.
It is to see if the cell in the column has an error.
If it does return one value, if it doesn't return a different value.
If NA, this test is also one that is built into the function.
It checks for a hash and slash a error in the cell, and then depending on what is there,
it returns one of two values.
Mathematical functions.
There's a ton of them in Calc, and possibly our friend Charles and New Jersey will want
to talk about some of those someday.
What I want to do right now is simply say there's a lot of them.
Begin with, you've got all of the trigonometric functions, all right.
Cotangent, cosine tangent, secant, cotangent, cosecant, arc sine, arc cosine, arc tangent,
arc cotangent, hyperbolic sine, hyperbolic cosine, hyperbolic tangent, hyperbolic secant,
hyperbolic cotangent, hyperbolic cosecant, you know, there's an awful lot of trigonometric
functions.
But you know, I suppose they need to be there for some reason.
Then you can convert degrees to radians and vice versa.
There's the random functions that we've already talked about.
And then there are the exponentials, rounding sums, including the sum of a series, absolute
value, and many more.
Then there are the array functions.
These include some of the standard linear algebra manipulations, such as finding the determinant,
inverting the array, multiplying two arrays, inner products, various summing of squares,
functions, and transposing rows and columns of an array.
There are also functions to get regression results calculated as an array.
Spreadsheet functions.
This is a bit of grab bag.
You have the lookup functions, applying a URL hyperlink, extracting data from a pivot table,
linking via dynamic data exchange to an external data source, and so on.
You can also apply a style to a cell or a range of cells.
We're going to be talking about pivot tables and styles in more depth later on in this
series.
Text functions.
This is another pretty miscellaneous group.
I will mention some of the ones that you might want to use, but you can explore this further
sometime if you want to do a deep dive.
But what are some of the text functions?
Convert Arabic numerals to Roman numerals and vice versa.
There's one function called Arabic and another one called Roman.
Convert a unicode number into the corresponding character or find the number for a given
character.
Those are unicarr and unicod.
Convert text to uppercase or lowercase.
The functions are upper and lower.
Concatenate several text strings.
That's a function concatenate.
Compare two cells and see if they have the exact same text strings.
That function is called exact.
Find a text string using the find and then find the first or last character of a text
string using left or right.
Remember, you can always drag to fill a column and apply these to many cells at once.
For example, I've had occasion to compare two long columns of numbers to see if any
in one column were missing the other.
And the exact function proved very useful for that.
Add in functions.
There's a lot of functions here that would be of use to a programmer.
We've got the vessel functions, vessel i, vessel j, vessel k, vessel y.
Conversion between binary, decimal, hexadecimal, and octal numbers.
These usually have something like bin to deck, bin to hex, bin to oct, deck to bin, and
that sort of thing.
So the two is the numeral two and not the word, not the letters t, so you've got a bunch
of those.
You've got various functions for dealing with imaginary and complex numbers, and functions
like complex, imaginary, IAM argument, IAM, COS, and so on.
So this concludes our look at functions in Excel Calc.
I hope you agree there is a lot of power in these functions, and that to be a proficient
spreadsheet user, you really need to have at least a few of them in your toolkit.
Which ones you will use will, of course, depend on what your interests are.
There are functions for accountants, stockbrokers, statisticians, scientists, engineers, programmers,
and so on.
So probably no one uses every function.
You need to learn the ones that are of interest to you, or are useful in the work that you
are doing.
So this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio, and as always reminding you to support
free software.
Bye bye.
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