For the most part, most people think of a spreadsheet as a two dimensional object, because there are rows and columns, and that’s pretty much it; but spreadsheets can also be created that have a third dimension by using tabs, like this:
In this scenario, a tab can serve as a third dimension. Think of your sheet as being a cube of numbers instead of just a 2-dimensional array.
To better help illustrate this, think of an apartment building that has three floors, with each floor having a 4×4 array of tenants. Then to make it as simple as possible, think of each room as having one person in it with just one name; you’d wind up with a cube full of one named people. With a spreadsheet, the floors would all be 2-dimensional representations of a floor map; the first floor would like this:
The second floor like this:
… and the third floor like this:
Each of these are a separate tab in a single worksheet. To make it more clear, you can change the names of the tabs from Sheet1, Sheet2 and Sheet3 to First, Second and Third, like this:
Now to use the 3-dimensional sheet you’ve created, you need to think of each person living in 3-dimensional space, with an address. For example, somebody named Rena lives on the third floor, in cell B2, so her address would be ThirdB2, or in spreadsheet terms Third!B2 (the exclamation mark signifies addresses between tabs).
So to use such a sheet you might add to your sheet something useful, like asking “Who lives in room X on the Yth floor?” So that the apartment manager could for instance, simply type in the address and come up with a name. In the sheet it would look something like this:
The cells with the circles represent where a user of the sheet would type first the room number, such as d4, then the floor, and then the sheet would give the answer, like this:
Jill lives in room d4 on the First floor, which you can see by looking at the First floor tab above.
Of course, to make the sheet give you the answer as seen above you have to use some Excel functions, in this case, you would first need to build the address by concatenating the floor name with the the cell address by doing this:
In this case, because the floor name is in cell K10, and the cell (room) address is in I10, we can make the address by concatenating them together using the “&” and adding a “!” between them to arrive at this:
…in cell K16, which we chose at random to hold the results of our concatenation. Next, in the answer cell, (where it says Jill above) we type =INDIRECT(K16) to cause the contents of cell K16 to be interpreted as a cell address rather than plain text, the result is the answer we were looking for, Jill.
This is all just one example of how to create a 3-D spreadsheet, but the principles are the same for other applications as well.
In this scenario, a tab can serve as a third dimension. Think of your sheet as being a cube of numbers instead of just a 2-dimensional array.
To better help illustrate this, think of an apartment building that has three floors, with each floor having a 4×4 array of tenants. Then to make it as simple as possible, think of each room as having one person in it with just one name; you’d wind up with a cube full of one named people. With a spreadsheet, the floors would all be 2-dimensional representations of a floor map; the first floor would like this:
The second floor like this:
… and the third floor like this:
Each of these are a separate tab in a single worksheet. To make it more clear, you can change the names of the tabs from Sheet1, Sheet2 and Sheet3 to First, Second and Third, like this:
Now to use the 3-dimensional sheet you’ve created, you need to think of each person living in 3-dimensional space, with an address. For example, somebody named Rena lives on the third floor, in cell B2, so her address would be ThirdB2, or in spreadsheet terms Third!B2 (the exclamation mark signifies addresses between tabs).
So to use such a sheet you might add to your sheet something useful, like asking “Who lives in room X on the Yth floor?” So that the apartment manager could for instance, simply type in the address and come up with a name. In the sheet it would look something like this:
The cells with the circles represent where a user of the sheet would type first the room number, such as d4, then the floor, and then the sheet would give the answer, like this:
Jill lives in room d4 on the First floor, which you can see by looking at the First floor tab above.
Of course, to make the sheet give you the answer as seen above you have to use some Excel functions, in this case, you would first need to build the address by concatenating the floor name with the the cell address by doing this:
In this case, because the floor name is in cell K10, and the cell (room) address is in I10, we can make the address by concatenating them together using the “&” and adding a “!” between them to arrive at this:
…in cell K16, which we chose at random to hold the results of our concatenation. Next, in the answer cell, (where it says Jill above) we type =INDIRECT(K16) to cause the contents of cell K16 to be interpreted as a cell address rather than plain text, the result is the answer we were looking for, Jill.
This is all just one example of how to create a 3-D spreadsheet, but the principles are the same for other applications as well.
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