Spreadsheet guides and more
Here’s a template which I created with the help of a few friends, a Senior Destinations Spreadsheet, which lets you and your group of friends share where you decide to go after high school. Of course, there are more applications of this than just that, but this is its intended use and audience.
Above is a preview of what this spreadsheet is capable of.
In this article, I will list many of the date functions you’ll need to do basic things.
There are a few things you need to know as dates.
Each date, for example, October 24, 2018, has an assigned Date Value, which in this case, is 43397. The Date Value’s “0” value is on December 30th, 1899. The Date Value increments by 1 per day, and it can go into the negatives. For example, January 1st, 1800 is -36522. These Date Values will be handy in the future.
However, let’s begin by discussing the format of dates.
Hey everyone, I’d like to share with you this amazing birthday calendar I’ve created via Google Sheets!
Here it is: Birthday Calendar Template
Recently, I was given a bunch of people’s full names in a list format. However, I wanted to change it to display their first and last names only. This wouldn’t have been so difficult if the names were given to me in [first middle last] format. However, they were given to me in [last, first middle] format. So, I’ve decided to help anyone who needs these kinds of formulas. I’ll walk you through my thinking process while coming up with these formulas. Note that they might need to be adjusted to suit your own needs. Here is my example document if you’d like to see how I did it, and here is how I set up the spreadsheet:
| B | D | E | F | H | |
| 2 | raw name | first name | middle name | last name | =D2&” “&F2 |
A little while ago, I decided to use Google Sheets to speed up my physics homework, as I realized that a lot of the questions were very similar, but changed a few of the numbers. I needed to round a number to the correct amount of significant figures in order to receive full credit. To expedite this process and save myself some time, I did some research on rounding in Google Sheets. Here, I’ll share what I’ve learned from Google’s Rounding Article and a few other sources.
Here is the spreadsheet that I created to demonstrate these functions.
Usage and syntax:
=ROUND(value, [places])
ROUND rounds a number to x decimal places.
The round function rounds a number using normal rounding rules. Note that places is in square brackets, meaning that it is an optional argument. “Value” is your input number, and “places” is the decimal place to round. Below is a quick table to help you out with the “places” input when using the round function.
| Number | 9 | 2 | 5 | . | 8 | 2 | 3 |
| Places | -2 | -1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
With the round function, you can round to the nearest hundreds by passing in -2 for your “places”, round to the nearest tens using -1, and much more.
Normal rounding rules round up when the digit after the digit you want to round is 5 or more and round down when it is less than 4 or below. For example, =ROUND(55.5, 0) would round up to 56 but =ROUND(55.49,0) would round down to 55.
This brings us to a very similar set of formulas that behave almost exactly like round.