Sorry for the vague subject line. I'm new to spreadsheets, having never really used one before, and am not really clear on what their capabilities are.
I've looked through the tutorial and manual for gnumeric and also the manual for openoffice calc and they confirmed that you can enter numbers into columns and rows in spreadsheets and then have them do automatic computations on columns and rows by specifying mathematical functions with operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, etc. What I want is a little different. I have some large sets of sequences of data. Each piece of data belongs to one of several classes, and I can label each data by its class. So I could call the classes 1,2,3,4 or A,B,C,D or whatever. The data I have are sequences of these classes, and what I want to do is various comparisons of the sequences. Say for example I have these two sequences: 1. A , D, F, G, H 2. D , C, B, A, Y I want to be able to compute the answers to questions like: * How many of the values in sequence 1 are also found in sequence 2? * To what degree does sequence 2 contain the same values of sequence 1 _in the same order_? * If sequence 2 contains letter X, does it later contain letter Y? (Yes, No, or N/A). * How often does letter C appear in all of the sequences? And I want to be able to compute the answers to these over large numbers of such sequences. As you can see, these are more like logical computations than obvious mathematical functions. At least, that's what they are to me. As I said the data don't have to be letters A, B, C, I could represent them as numbers or anything else. As long as each item has a unique symbol. Is this the kind of computation that gnumeric can do for me? And if so, can anyone give me a clue how I would get started inputting these sorts of functions into gnumeric? As I said, although I've read the manuals, I've never used a spreadsheet before, and so I don't even know what they are capable of or appropriate for. Thanks _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
