by Richard Stokes
This week’s tip is a quick one because sometimes the easiest things are right in front of your nose. If you work in spreadsheets a lot you probably need to view the sum of a range of numbers but may not necessarily need the formula to be a permanent resident on your spreadsheet.
Up until yesterday I would input the =SUM() formula in order to view a total. No more – there’s a much better way to quickly see this:
In the illustrated spreadsheet, the Practice Administrator of XYZ Medical Group has asked me what the total cost is for just the workstations that they are about to buy as part of their network upgrade. I quickly highlight the three cells associated with the desktop, laptop and tablet PC’s and at the bottom of the spreadsheet (red box in the associated image) it automatically calculates the average, count and sum in the status bar.
This tool works for both columns and rows and it also ignores any cells that you click that contain text or graphics instead of numbers. Give it a try – I think my exact words were “Huh, I never knew that was there!”
