Re: [libreoffice-users] Counting Instances

On 12/29/2013 03:12 PM, Keith Bates wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've used Libre Office for years, but I am an absolute newbie as far 
> as Calc is concerned for anything but the very basics. :)
>
> Here is my problem.
>
> My church has to report to the copyright licence holders the names of 
> the songs it uses and the number of times each song is used in a given 
> time period.
>
> The software we use for projecting the words for songs (OpenLP) will 
> produce the name of each song used in each service. It will generate a 
> CSV
>
> Obviously it is easy enough to import that into a spreadsheet.
>
> How can I then count the number of times each song is used? I could 
> sort the table by song title and then count them manually, but I am 
> guessing there would be some sort of function that automates the 
> counting.
>
> Thanks for any help on this.
Kieth

I would try the COUNTIF(). The syntax is =COUNTIF(range, criteria). The 
range is the column with the titles and the criteria is the title you 
want counted. I would set up the data one sheet and in another I would 
set a column with each title and in the next column have 
=COUNTIF(datasheet.range, cell). The only problem is if you accidentally 
missed of the titles in the range. Assuming an average of 3 services per 
week that use 5 songs you have about 780 separate instances that a song 
was used. I can see easily missing a single title.

An alternative is to use Base with the data uploaded to a table. CSV 
files work very well with databases. Then the have Base count each 
title. Most people find databases more intimidating because they do not 
directly work them. But once you get familiar with them you might find 
this an easier approach for problems like this.

I tend to use raw SQL when working with Base (mostly because I use SQL 
at work). In SQL the query would look like this:

SELECT Count(*) AS Count <AS count is optional>
FROM  Songs <use actual table name>
GROUP BY Title <use actual column name which has the titles>

If you want you can send me a typical dataset to off list and I will 
look at both with Calc and Base.

Jay

--
Jay Lozier
jslozier@gmail.com


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