LibreOffice Spreadsheet Statistics Primer Tutorial

LibreOffice Spreadsheet Statistics Primer Tutorial

Spreadsheets and numbers go together, and a spreadsheet will probably improve the presentation and functionality of data involving numbers, over any thoughts you have towards presenting this data in a document, using your desktop document processing suite of software.

Were you annoyed by my use of the term “document processing” in such a generic way? Hope not, because, in our experience, for the vast majority of scenarios that matter for day to day usage, there is adequate functionality to achieve what you want in any of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice or LibreOffice. It just so happens today we work with LibreOffice, but, as we say, you’ll see the same things achievable in the other two “document processing” suites.

And so the document talked about with LibreOffice Once Upon A Time Primer Tutorial as shown below, entirely consisted of words, and so we used the “Text Document” parts of the LibreOffice software, while today, our data involves names of dinosaurs and some accompanying numerical data about the lengths of these animals. The original format of this data was in CSV (ie. comma separated values) format, a “flat” ascii text format, synonymous with “Spreadsheet” data, and so we use this part of the LibreOffice software suite to proceed, as today’s slideshow does, with today’s tutorial, which …

1. creates a Pivot Table … via Data -> Pivot Table -> Create… … and take a quick look at some sorting options … and then …
2. highlight the Length numerical values (all 28 of them) … and then …
3. use Data -> Statistics -> Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)… to write a report with top left at cell D1 …
   
   … and then …
4. use Data -> Statistics -> Descriptive Statistics… to write a report with top left at cell D13 …
   
   … and then …

… giving your fingers a lot of rest if they’ve been beavering away trying to work all this statistical analysis at a calculator … or perhaps via scratching the head … chortle, chortle.

We think there are many useful matters to research off this “Data” menu …

… and we’ll probably be back hereabouts pretty soon, we figure … chortle, chortle.

Previous relevant LibreOffice Once Upon A Time Primer Tutorial is shown below.

LibreOffice Once Upon A Time Primer Tutorial

One of my students is getting very good at Word Processing. Lately, her skills have been improving by being given the task of mimicking the look of pieces of hard copy documents with various levels of complexity.

The other day we came across what we like to think of as the …

O^{nce upon a time}

… scenario, and try as we might fiddling with “top” justifications and font size adjustments we couldn’t get a good look in her “document processing” software to nicely (enough) line up the smaller font letters to the top of the bigger “O”.

Were you annoyed by my “document processing” genericity? Hope not, because, in our experience, for the vast majority of scenarios that matter for day to day usage, there is adequate functionality to achieve what you want in any of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice or LibreOffice. It just so happens today we work with LibreOffice, but, as we say, you’ll see the same things achievable in the other two “document processing” suites.

Are you surprised if we tell you that the achievement of a neat looking O^{nce upon a time} in LibreOffice is quite difficult, we think, anyway?

We think, though that the functionalities involved in achieving a solution revolve around …

• using tables … creation of, merging cells of, adjusting row heights of, adjusting column widths of, the use of hard break text with cells, adjusting properties (eg. turning on/off borders)
• adjusting font sizes
• using Format->Character Subscript (and you’ll also find Superscript sometimes useful) … unticking Auto to release positioning functionality essential to the positioning of the big “O”
• using Format->Paragraph … not useful here today … but generally useful regarding vertical justification

We direct you here to a slideshow of a warts and all look at the creation of a O^{nce upon a time} document snippet.

Please note, that, sadly, the Save As HTML option did not create a very useful HTML snippet here …

… but, you will find, we think, easier ways to do this “thinking HTML and CSS”, but that is for another time. Thanks, today, to this useful link, for the start of one of the O^{nce upon a time} stories. Hope this helps you out.

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