The Spreadseet is Fixed

As stated in my previous post, some of my poker spreadsheets will be large, possibly more than 1,000 rows.  I was trying figure out how to make that work while freezing both the column headings at the top and the totals at the bottom.  I saw myself scrolling back and forth between 1,000 rows of online tournament results.  I knew that there must be a better way.

I got on the Open Office Calc forums and posted about what I was trying to do.  I got an answer from someone in Hungary.  It was both simple and brilliant--put the totals at the top of the spreadsheet with the column headings.

I had to twice read what the guy wrote.  I was trying to figure out why I would want to put the totals at the top.  After a couple minutes it finally sunk in.  It doesn't matter where on the page the totals are.

The way the totaling function works is that I tell the cell where to get the numbers.  For example, if I type the following function into the cell;

=SUM(E5:E1000)

it adds up all of the numbers from cells E5 to E1005, 1,000 rows, one row for each tournament.

It doesn't matter where the summation cell is, only what I type into it.

I was so stuck in my world where totals are at the bottom of a column of numbers that I didn't even consider that there was another option.  I pride myself on being an outside-the-box thinker but I had to be dragged out of that box.  Here is a small section of that spreadsheet so that you can see what it looks like:

Players	Buy-ins	Add-ons	Re-entries	Re-buys	Cashes
2,996	$76.50	$0.00	$0.00	$2.50	$132.42
70	1.10				2.15
73	1.10				9.10

I couldn't show all of the columns because there are 18 of them.  The totals are in bold type just below the column headings.  Whenever I enter another row of information those bold numbers are automatically recalculated and I can see at a glance where everything stands

Totals at the top of the page.  It works so well and now seems so obvious.  I can't believe that I didn't think of it myself.