Sum*It Manual
Formulas should always start with an equation character (=). This
to differentiate them from ordinary strings.
In a formula you can use numbers, strings, operators like '+' and
'-' and formulas like SUM and VLOOKUP. A formula has a result
which will be displayed in its cell. The result can be of any type.
You can use constants in formula's, like 1.23 or "This is a string",
(note that text constants need to be quoted, esp. if they contain
spaces). You can also reference the values of other cells. You do
this by entering the name of the cell whose value you want.
E.g. 'A1' or 'GB12'.
So the formula '=A1+1.2' results in a value of 2.2 being displayed
if the cell A1 contains the value 1.0.
If you try to enter an incorrect formula and Sum*It is able to detect
this, a dialog will appear explaining what was wrong and the part
containing the error will be selected.
An error which cannot be detected when entering a formula, e.g. adding
a string to a number, will result in an error value being displayed.
If the operants are incompatible, a !VALUE error will be displayed.
Other common errors are !REF, when you try to reference a value in
a cell which does not contain the requested type.
Circular dependancies are considered an error and every cell in the
circle will display !CIRCLE after calculation.
The formula being entered is expected to have the same decimal point
character as used for formatting, so this is also controlled by the
system settings. System settings of number formats can be changed
with the 'Numbers' control panel.
Sum*It knows of four data types. Numbers, text, booleans and date/time.
Numbers are stored internally as doubles, resulting in double precision.
This means that most calculations should give accurate results. But don't
forget that Sum*It uses floating point representations of actual values,
as do all spreadsheet applications. This representation may not be accurate
so rounding errors may occur. Especially if you work with very large numbers.
Booleans can be TRUE or FALSE.
The dates and times are internally stored as the number of seconds that
passed since 1 january 1904. It is possible to
substract one date of another, resulting in the number of seconds between
the two, but you cannot add two dates (you may have to think about that one!).
The rule is you cannot mix these types,
e.g. you cannot add some text to a number. The exception is date/time,
to which you can add numbers which will be interpreted as seconds.
However, there are routines which can convert one type to another, e.g. NUM2C
converts a number to its textual representation.
In formulas several operators are recognized. They are listed
here in order of precedence. (which means those higher in the list
will be calculated first).
| Operator(s) | Description |
|---|
| ^ | Exponentiation |
| *,/ | Multiplication and Division |
| (root character, OPTION v) | Square root |
| +,- | Addition and Substraction |
| =,<,<=,=>,>,<> | Boolean operations |
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Sum*It Manual, HTML Edition, for Release 1.0 of Sum*It.