Calc Guide

Practical problems and questions
• To display additional values for May, June, July, and so on, you need to add
extra columns; that is, you have to change the structure of the calculation
sheet. This is not only somewhat inefficient from a workflow point of view, but
it also raises some practical questions: How do references react if you add
more columns or rows to the sum formulas?
• The layout, where the timeline is displayed horizontally, is less convenient if
you want to add more months. A vertical layout might be a more efficient use
of space. How can the table be transposed? Do you have to enter everything
again?
• What if management asks unexpected questions or adds an additional
subdivision for the different sales regions or a constraint of the sales for a
given employee? In these cases you again have to manually add all the sums
and create different tables in many variations.
• Is it really acceptable and realistic to create such an overview by adding the
different values manually? This is really a lot of work and extremely error-
prone!
Solution
The most important part of your task in the example is the addition of the Total sales
per month cells, which had to be done manually. To do this automatically with the
program, just get the data into Calc. You can enter the single numbers by hand or you
can import a file from your bookkeeping software. In any case we assume a
continuous table that keeps track of all sales in a somewhat primitive form.
Figure 166: Basic data in Calc
Chapter 8 Using the DataPilot 195