Learning Google spreadsheet part 2

There is a saying that life means uninterrupted learning. As far as my personal learning experience is concerned, besides my learning activities during my schooling time, the one I have learned wholeheartedly and persistently is Google spreadsheet.

I have written a post previously about how I got involved in the learning of this application provided by Google for free to the mass public. As of the time I am writing this post as the part two of this series, I feel that my passion for a further learning of this subject is still very high. It is so high that since I have started learning and practicing on this software eight months ago, the time and energy I spend on the learning, contemplating and experimenting of an actual system I made from scratch for my son to use on his music teaching business is still increasing. Sometimes I think that I have taken it as an entertainment. Sometimes I feel that I have become addicted to the learning process of this application. What has made me become so deeply absorbed?

My perception of the software that is called spreadsheet is that it is a very powerful information managing tool. With this tool you can tailor-make all of the formulas suitable to your peculiar need and insert them in any specified array of cells, and it will sort out all the data in the corresponding columns and rows. To learn some basic formulas such as the combination of the Google code, we have to be very patient at the beginning stage of the learning. Take the system I constructed for Chenny as an example. At first, I aimed to make a timetable that shows all the classes in a week; a student profile that records all the contact details, their class time, fee to charge; and a class log for him to enter the payment, lesson delivered, and the account balance. First of all I have to work out a formula which is able to import data from the timetable Chenny is using every day. The student name on Chenny's timetable will go to the student sheet to look for the name of a peculiar student, once it is located, the weekday and lessen time allocated to that student on Chenny's timetable will be displayed in the right columns and rows.

It sounds very easy and simple, but you have to learn to use the language that Google spreadsheet can understand, and then you have to be able to write a correct formula and embed it in the target cell. When these two conditions are met, the data supposed to fill up that cell will pop on when you press the 'enter' key. Once you have all these done, the program will automatically fill up the timetable with the student names on each of the correct positions.

The longest the I have ever written could be this one:

=iferror(FILTER(transpose(TimeTable!$A$1:$H$1),search($B49,transpose(TimeTable!$A$2:$H$2&

TimeTable!$A$3:$H$3&TimeTable!$A$4:$H$4&TimeTable!$A$5:$H$5&TimeTable!$A$6:$H$6&

TimeTable!$A$7:$H$7&TimeTable!$A$8:$H$8&TimeTable!$A$9:$H$9&TimeTable!$A$10:$H$10&

TimeTable!$A$11:$H$11&TimeTable!$A$12:$H$12&TimeTable!$A$13:$H$13&TimeTable!$A$14:$H$14&

TimeTable!$A$15:$H$15&TimeTable!$A$16:$H$16&TimeTable!$A$17:$H$17&TimeTable!$A$18:$H$18&

TimeTable!$A$19:$H$19&TimeTable!$A$20:$H$20&TimeTable!$A$21:$H$21&TimeTable!$A$22:$H$22&

TimeTable!$A$23:$H$23&TimeTable!$A$24:$H$24&TimeTable!$A$25:$H$25&TimeTable!$A$26:$H$26&

TimeTable!$A$27:$H$27&TimeTable!$A$28:$H$28))),"")

And a few short ones:

=SUM(E4:P4)

=$J14*2

=query(index(ARRAYFORMULA('Lesson log'!$A$1:$M1)), "select Col1, Col2, Col3, Col4, Col5, Col6, Col7, Col8, Col9, Col10, Col12")

With all of these formulas working together, they produced reports and graphs like the screenshots shown above:

I said that I seem to have become addicted to writing formulas, and it is quite true. Because during this eight months of time, besides the fixed daily activities such as having a tea break; time for meals; sitting meditation and spiritual practice, every bit of the free time I have are spent in the contemplating, writing, modifying and fixing the formulas.

Fellow Buddhists I know advised me quite often that people of my age should be concentrated in the spiritual practice so as to achieve a peaceful and blissful ending of our life. Engaging in the worldly pursuit may end up with our stronger sticking to our sensual pleasure and is a great obstacle to the most important life objective – Nivana. This is true. And so, I have promised to make some adjustment of my daily living schedule from next week.