Beginning OpenOffice Calc: From Setting Up Simple Spreadsheets to Business Forecasting

Referencing Cells

Typing all sorts of information into a worksheet is a good way to organize it, but that is all you can do with it. If you want to process that data, you need a way to reference the values stored inside cells and a notation that lets you express how you want to process those values.

Referencing cells and processing data is possible thanks to two powerful tools: cell addressing and formulas.

• Being able to reference other cells using their addresses lets you create formulas that update their results as soon as you finish editing the values to which they refer.
• Any address inside a single sheet in a worksheet is made of two coordinates: a column number represented by a sequence of letters (e.g., AF) and an integer row number (e.g., ...