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hpr_transcripts/hpr1575.txt

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+Episode: 1575
+Title: HPR1575: 35 - LibreOffice Calc - Introduction to Functions
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1575/hpr1575.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:12:31
+
+---
+
+This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
+Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
+That's HBR15.
+Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
+Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hack Republic Radio and another
+exciting episode in our ongoing series on LibreOfficeCalk and over the last few of the episodes
+we got into talking about charts and graphs but now I want to talk about functions and functions
+are an interesting capability that spreadsheets have to allow you to do some analysis and other
+sorts of things with the data. Now the first question you might say is what is a function?
+There's various ways of answering this. My friend Charles in New Jersey who does the
+Mathematics series here on Hack Republic Radio may explore this in more depth at some point.
+Who knows, it is an interesting topic. So I'm going to offer up what the dictionary says
+from the online Miriam Webster dictionary and link in the show notes if you really want to
+know that sort of thing. And a function is a mathematical correspondence that assigns exactly one
+element of one set to each element of the same or another set. And the second is a variable
+as a quality trait or measurement that depends on and varies with another, also a result.
+Now my way of thinking about it in reference to LibreOfficeCalk comes from the second of these.
+A function is something that takes an input from data already on the spreadsheet and returns
+an answer of some kind sometimes but not always a numerical answer.
+There are a large number of functions available in Calc so I don't intend to discuss each one in
+depth but I do want to give you an overview. So what I'm going to do now is discuss some of the more
+common and useful functions. And right now though what I want to do is I want to run through
+that what is available then in subsequent episodes will start unpacking some of these.
+So Calc Functions. First there's database. Now Calc can be used for simple flat file database uses.
+Generally speaking I prefer to use an actual database program for most of my database needs
+and LibreOffice does come with one but if your needs are extremely simple Calc can get you by
+and these functions can be used to do database queries such as getting account of the entries,
+the average minimum maximum and so on of all the cells that match the search query.
+Then there are the date and time functions. There are a lot of functions which do things like
+return the number of days in the year in which a date occurs or the number of days, months,
+or years between two dates, then financial. Calc has a lot of financial functions which you should
+expect given that spreadsheets were primarily adopted by companies to do financial management.
+If you ever wanted to figure out when your mortgage would be paid off,
+here's one place you could go. There are also functions for finding the future value of an investment
+appreciation over time, various ways of pricing stocks. Some of these would only be of interest to
+a few people. Some of them might be of broader interest and I already got some things that I'm
+going to do to illustrate what you can do with financial functions. Information.
+These functions can be very useful for doing analysis a large spreadsheet model.
+Many of these functions are logical functions which means they return a value of true
+if certain criteria are met. As examples you can tell which cells contain formulas, which cells
+have errors and so on. Then there's also the logical functions that allow you to do simple logical
+tests using operators like AND, IF and XOR. When I see something about a function returning
+a value of true, I'm reminded of the joke about the programmer who was talking with a friend of
+hers and said, oh, I'm pregnant and the friend said, oh, is it a boy or a girl? And the programmer says
+true, I'm going to hope you all get that one. Okay, mathematical functions. There are mathematical
+functions in here. All of the usual trigonometric functions like your sine and your cosine.
+There's factorials, radians. There's random number functions. I use those and so on.
+Array. An array is a linked rectangle of cells in its simplest form. Array functions
+let you work on the entire rectangle of cells with one function. How this would include basic
+matrix operations such as inverting the matrix. Now, if you don't know what inverting a matrix is
+about that may indicate it's not anything that's terribly important. But, you know, when I was working
+on my doctorate in economics, that was one of those things you had to understand. Statistical.
+There's a reasonably large set of statistical functions in calcs such as beta distributions,
+chi-square, f-test, mean, geometric mean, harmonic mean, poisson, standard deviation and variance
+and various regression functions. You could certainly teach a full semester in statistics using
+these functions. In fact, I've done so. Spreadsheet. There are spreadsheet functions that
+allow you to do things like insert a hyperlink, do a lookup, insert a style and so on.
+Text functions, but you didn't expect to see that one. But, these functions operate on cells
+like the contents are purely text strings. So, you can convert Roman numerals to Arabic,
+concatenate several items into one, compare two cells to see if they are the same.
+You can even do a rot-13. I hope everyone knows what a rot-13 is. You don't see it that much these
+days, but in the earlier days, the internet, it was tons of fun. Add in. Now, there are specialized
+functions in the add-in that let you operate on complex and imaginary numbers, use Bessel functions,
+do conversions between binary, hex, octal, and decimal. For anyone who does programming,
+these conversion functions will come in handy. Now, working with functions. And we're going to do
+this a lot over the next few episodes. So, let's get the basics right. There are some general
+principles that you use in working with functions in Calc. When you select a function that you want
+to use in the function wizard window, you will see on the right a very brief description of the
+function. And, usually, in parentheses, you will see the names of the variables that are needed
+as inputs to the function. Now, these have a special name in mathematics they're referred to as
+arguments. And this really has nothing to do with people yelling at each other. It's a technical
+term in mathematics. There's a Wikipedia definition, link in the show notes. A mathematical
+function has one or more arguments in the form of independent variables designated in the functions
+definition, which can also contain parameters. The individual, the independent variables are
+mentioned in the list of arguments that the function takes, whereas the parameters are not.
+So, what does it mean to you? When you use the function, you need to enter something for each
+of these arguments. And it should be in the form of a cell address that contains the required
+information. When you select the function and know that you have all of the required information,
+click next in the function wizard. Each of the arguments will get an input field.
+You can type it in directly. You can click the roll-up button on the right and then click a cell.
+Or, if you can see the cell you want, just click in the field to put your insertion mark there,
+then click the cell and you should see the cell address entered into the field in the function wizard.
+Now, do this for each argument in turn and you will see the formula being constructed in the box below.
+When you're done, click OK and see the result. Now, if you want to apply the function repeatedly,
+like in a column, just click and drag to fill it. All of the cell addresses will increment normally.
+So, with that, I'm going to sign off for now. This is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, reminding you
+as always to support FreeSoftware. Goodbye!
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