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On 12/29/2013 05:47 PM, doug wrote:
On 12/29/2013 05:10 PM, Jay Lozier wrote:

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

I'm wondering if you are expected to pay royalties on the music. If so, I would think that there is enough sacred music in the public domain that you could forget about the problem, and save money for the church to use for religious purposes. You should have your music director look into that.
--doug


Aside on copyright. The problem is the song book may include works that still have a copyright. Given the length of copyrights you might be surprised what still has a valid copyright. For music, royalties are do for publication (song book), performance (this situation), broadcasting the song, and using it other media (movie for example). While I do not know Australian copyright details the general details are the same by international treaties. In the US the fines can get very steep for copyright infringement - up to $150k per infringement. So being proactive and paying the royalties will much cheaper in the long run if a bit of a pain.

--
Jay Lozier
jslozier@gmail.com


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