4.8 Spreadsheets with details and summary

A common organization for spreadsheets is to have a bunch of “detail” rows, each perhaps describing a transaction, and then a set of “summary” rows that each show reduced data for some subset of the details. SES supports this organization via the ses-select function.

(ses-select fromrange test torange)

Returns a subset of torange. For each member in fromrange that is equal to test, the corresponding member of torange is included in the result.

Example of use:

(ses-average (ses-select (ses-range A1 A5) 'Smith (ses-range B1 B5)))

This computes the average of the ‘B’ column values for those rows whose ‘A’ column value is the symbol ‘'Smith’.

Arguably one could specify only fromrange plus to-row-offset and to-column-offset. The torange is stated explicitly to ensure that the formula will be recalculated if any cell in either range is changed.

File etc/ses-example.el in the Emacs distribution is an example of a details-and-summary spreadsheet.