Google docs/excel formula help

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blackjack17

1705 posts

Uber Geek

#136447 27-Nov-2013 11:09

Hi I am a teacher (science) at a high school and we are trying to collect some data to very roughly traffic light students, meaning for the year 10s those that are going to have some serious issues with NCEA, moderate issues, and those that we aren't worried about, i.e. red, orange and green.

I have made a google doc where teachers can next to the students name can write 1 for red, 2 for orange and 3 for green and with conditional formatting it is working well.

The next step is to start extracting some information based on sex and ethnicity.

What I want to do is a count formula adding up the 1, 2, and 3 if the cell adjacent is a red, orange or green and the same for the ethnicity.

I have attached a google doc (names removed) or if someone can point me in the right direction as to what function I should be using.

Cheers

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvjFV-K7Ke3zdGhvZnBUanhzSVFVTTZ4QUhBR3RkelE&usp=sharing

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wellygary

8312 posts

Uber Geek

#941665 27-Nov-2013 12:04

"What I want to do is a count formula adding up the 1, 2, and 3 if the cell adjacent is a red, orange or green and the same for the ethnicity."

Can you explain this a little more,

Based on what you have earlier said the red, orange and green are determined by the value in the cell (i.e 1,2,3)?

Are you just wanting to count the number of 1s 2s and 3s awarded to each student, or is there some additional conditional requirement?

blackjack17

1705 posts

Uber Geek

#941694 27-Nov-2013 12:58

Sorry, half finished post, dealt with a student and then finished it (badly).

The 1, 2, 3 have conditional formatting (which isn't important for the question).

What I want is to know is the number of males with a 1, a 2, and a 3 for each column , then I can do the same for the females.

For the total frequency I can do =FREQUENCY(C4:C207,A211:A213) but what I want to do is If B? = m then FREQUENCY(C4:C207,A211:A213).

While I know I can just sort by sex then do the frequency function on each half of the data, I would prefer to do it without sorting.

Cheers

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Hammerer

2476 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#941713 27-Nov-2013 13:30

Blast, I just finished writing why your comment made no sense when you responded.

You want the countifs function in Excel. It is a countif with multiple criteria. Each criteria has the range to test [edit to correct mistake "text"] then the criteria.

In your example, to count all males with English traffic light red you would use countifs(column of subject scores,subject score, column of sex,sex):
=countifs(c4:c207,1,b4:b207,"M")

Personally, I would skip the functions for these sorts of reports. I would use pivot tables instead.

andrewNZ

2487 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#941725 27-Nov-2013 13:44

Bottom corner of the sheet :-)

(I haven't verified the results)

Hammerer

2476 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#941739 27-Nov-2013 13:55

Cool, I see that I didn't need to make the example so simple.

Seriously, you should learn how to use Excel pivot tables because the summary results are automatically tabular with the ability to drill down. So say, for example, you want to see who the 78 students are with 1's then you just double-click on the result and excel extracts all the records into a separate sheet.

andrewNZ

2487 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#941742 27-Nov-2013 14:00

Never used pivot tables, going to have to go do some learning now I think.

blackjack17

1705 posts

Uber Geek

#941773 27-Nov-2013 14:45

I think I might have to transfer the data into excel as I can't make sense of the google pivot tables.

Google docs was great in being able to send a link to a number of teacher and have them fill it out nice and easily.

What I was kind of hoping to be able to do was end up with a table like

English 20% of males are in the red zone while only 5% of females
Science 15% ...

Cheers all

will go have a play with pivot after writing reports

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