Re: Using dsum across sheets

[Mike Perry <mikepery fscked org>]

Thus spake Jean Br?fort (jean brefort ac-dijon fr):

> Le dim 25/01/2004 ?? 19:01, Mike Perry a ??crit :
> > Thus spake Jean Br?fort (jean brefort ac-dijon fr):
> > Also, do I really need to use a range for the third argument? I really
> > don't want to have to create 16+ (the actual number of Jobs is
> > unbounded) mini-tables with just a "Job #" and a number in it,
> > especially when I already number each job in the Jobtable sheet. Is
> > there a function or something I can do to avoid all these needless
> > mini-tables?
> 
> This is how database functions work. I don't think you can avoid them.
> It works the same in OpenCalc or Excel.

Ewww, yeah, I'm completely new to spreadsheets with gnumeric, so I
wasn't aware of this limitation.

So then basically what I have to do is create a whole new sheet that
is of the following form:

Job #  Job #  ....  Job #
 1      2             N

and then reference that? That's kinda.. uncomfortable.. because not only
does it mean I have to add new jobs to both sheets, but since my DSUM
formula goes into the "Total Time" column of my jobtable, I don't see an
easy way to get my DSUM formula to be copied with an autofill. In
otherwords, if I simply drag the DSUM formula down, I get:

=dsum(TimeTable!A$1:F$45,"Time Delta",JobTranspose!A1:A2)
=dsum(TimeTable!A$1:F$45,"Time Delta",JobTranspose!A2:A3)

Which simply won't work no matter how I finagle the JobTranspose sheet
layout.

How is this issue typically solved? I would assume this would be a pretty
common thing to do in a spreadsheet (and thus should be straightforward), 
but as I said, I'm new to the whole gig. Maybe I'm approaching the
problem entirely wrong? Maybe people do something other than DSUM for
this type of task?

> > Example 5.7 of the manual (same page) says I am supposedly able to specify
> > combination of cells with commas, which is again misleading cause it
> > doesn't work in this case.
> 
> This is true for functions which accept only a range of cells as sole
> argument. A1,B2,C4,C5,D6 is considered as a single argument. For
> functions several arguments, it would not be possible to know where the
> arguments start and end if each one is a list of comma separated cell
> references. It would be possible if the separators were not the same but
> it is unfortunately not the case.

Yeah, I kinda figured that. Was hoping there was some magic that could
be done, like packing the arguments into an array or something...

Thanks for all your help,

-- 
Mike Perry
Mad Computer Scientist
fscked.org evil labs