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Uhh...does OpenOffice not have COUNTIF? COUNTIF is pretty bread and butter when you're using Excel... [/me decides not to be lazy, Googles] Yup, it's there:

Uhh...does OpenOffice not have COUNTIF? COUNTIF is pretty bread and butter when you're using Excel... [/me decides not to be lazy, Googles] Yup, it's there: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/How_Tos/Calc:_COUNTIF_function http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/How_T... Get to know your spreadsheet functions, it will save you a lot of time and effort in the long run, half the stuff that you need is built in. The other half, you won't believe that it's not, but at least you'll know when you actually need to waste your time implementing simple counting hacks.

param 17y ago
heh, even though these are not completely analogous, I am reminded of old discussions when I would say 'I implemented this cool thing in C', and my roomie would say 'I just used this java library method'.
- ewjordan 17y ago
  This brings up a good point, though: there's a reason people that have struggled with the lack of built in functionality in languages like C tend to be better programmers, even if they make a switch to languages with more featureful standard libs. The act of hacking your way through even the smallest tasks teaches you a lot. And there are plenty of times in Excel where you'll need to hack your way through - it's got a lot of functionality, but once you move past what it's specifically designed to do, you'll start to get annoyed. That's when you start seeing INDIRECT and VLOOKUP all over the place, and you start to curse the developers that designed the whole damn system. More than a few times I've started some analysis in Excel, but decided in the end that I'd just rather fiddle with primitive arrays in a sane programming language because of the hoops you need to jump through in Excel. Perhaps if the scripting language was anything but VBA, if it was less tedious to add built in functions that you can use from the spreadsheet, or if the syntax for working with the spreadsheet from within VBA wasn't so heavy, it would be more tolerable, but you can't win them all...

param 17y ago

heh, even though these are not completely analogous, I am reminded of old discussions when I would say 'I implemented this cool thing in C', and my roomie would say 'I just used this java library method'.

ewjordan 17y ago
This brings up a good point, though: there's a reason people that have struggled with the lack of built in functionality in languages like C tend to be better programmers, even if they make a switch to languages with more featureful standard libs. The act of hacking your way through even the smallest tasks teaches you a lot. And there are plenty of times in Excel where you'll need to hack your way through - it's got a lot of functionality, but once you move past what it's specifically designed to do, you'll start to get annoyed. That's when you start seeing INDIRECT and VLOOKUP all over the place, and you start to curse the developers that designed the whole damn system. More than a few times I've started some analysis in Excel, but decided in the end that I'd just rather fiddle with primitive arrays in a sane programming language because of the hoops you need to jump through in Excel. Perhaps if the scripting language was anything but VBA, if it was less tedious to add built in functions that you can use from the spreadsheet, or if the syntax for working with the spreadsheet from within VBA wasn't so heavy, it would be more tolerable, but you can't win them all...