Excel Mental Models and the Eli Whitney Syndrome

S

Spalding

I am the kind of person who really benefits from knowing why and ho
something works. This was once called the Eli Whitney syndrome by Pa
Bedard of Car and Driver. If I remember correctly, he was talkin
about the old points and condenser being easier to understand tha
electronics. I agree - seeing the gears turn really helps m
understand how something operates. I think that's why electronics an
software can be so exasperating - anything can and does happen behin
the scenes!

A good Excel example is one that I found in these Excel forums - tha
the auto filter actually just makes the row height zero - pretty slick
I had no idea what was happening behind the scenes, so I alway
wondered why a sum at the bottom of filtered rows would still add the
in. I just recently did a fill down on a filtered list, and then did
SHOW ALL to ensure that the unseen rows didn't get filled in. That'
not really important, but I felt better doing it knowing about the ro
height thing. I still want to create formulas to count filtered rows
but it looks like the row height is accessible only through VBA, whic
will slow me down considerably.

So are there any other good examples of good mental models helping yo
with Excel
 
D

DDM

Spalding, lemme address one little thing: If you wanna work with filtered
lists (sum, count, whatever), take a look at the SUBTOTAL worksheet
function. It'll save you considerable time and effort.
 
S

Spalding

Thanks, ddm, that does the trick.

I thought I had tried it before with no luck but SUBTOTAL with COUNT
just worked like a charm to count entries in a filtered list
 
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