LEFT, RIGHT and FIND

Strings and things Think spreadsheets and you normally think numbers. However they are good at many processing tasks including text processing. Here we use a simple example from by Sumit Bansal in trumpexcel.com, extracting the first word from a cell. The article...

Seeing the cities

Much of excitement about big data and visualisation bridges two ends of a complex problem, first get the data and make sense of it and then visualise it! Sourcing and combining the data is one challenge, but once you see what visualisation is when you start to realise...

Looking up …

Looking up and extracting data from tables of numbers and strings is one of those things that most serious data analysts need to do on a regular basis. If you’re familiar with Excel, you may have come across VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP and more recently XLOOKUP. Each of...

Fixing a spreadsheet formula

We have done a little theorising on complexity of working with a simple functional language. Although not necessarily famed for being a functional language, we are looking at spreadsheets and applying a classical model of human performance known as the Keystroke Level...