Spreadsheet Automation 101 Lesson 1: A1 Notation vs Row,Column Syntax

About this Tutorial

Make A1 not so limited. Learn more about A1 Notation and how it can be changed to row, column. Do more with A1 Notation.

Video Transcript

0:00 So I wanted to go into more about this, a one notation and how it can be replicated or, or changed to Rowe column and also why.
0:10 So in our last formula we created here, we have a range. We have a sheet. And when we type in this, get a one from a sheet, we have a one and the sheet, we have a sheet, sheet one, and hopefully we'll get that stuff right.
0:31 The stuff that's in a one, we get it here. Cool. We can do that anywhere, right? But this a one notation is a bit limiting in code because we need to know the, the column number sorry, the column letter and the rowe number.
0:44 We have to actually do that and in, in the string too. That's really un fungible to to be exact. So sometimes what we wanna do, instead of this range, we wanna do something like one one, which looks like one, one.
1:01 And what this is is calling the first. The first number means the row, and the second number means the column.
1:09 Now, when we have an actual number, we can do really cool things with this. We can do get the last row and put a number there.
1:15 We can get the last column, put the number there. Sometimes we might not, we might actually want to get a column and we're like, oh we want everything on the K column.
1:25 And we're like, what num what number is the letter? K? One simple thing you can do is equals column and put the parentheses and it'll tell you right there what column it's in.
1:36 So that's 11. So the K column will be 11 and we want to get that value. And now we can also change this back to actually we don't need to change it, we can save it.
1:48 And now we're gonna get what's in K one equals, let's get that function name correct. Now all we need is the sheet one here, and we're gonna get the K column, ideally right, 11, perfect.
2:04 That's getting whatever value is here. So we can type in any value there, redo dysfunction, and it'll call exactly that information there.
2:15 So what this does is allows us to really change it and make it more flexible. This row, again, it's row first and then column.
2:23 There are four potential options you can do with this range. Whenever you do get range and you start typing like a number, actually, sorry, if you open, start the open parentheses, it will tell you some options here.
2:39 So we go one and one, so that's row and column and that's if you only want one cell. But let's say we want a number of rows, we hit again the let's see, I want to bring this down a little bit.
2:55 You should be able to see this easier. There you go. It's Actually, actually even more up there. Wait, maybe I'll do that.
3:05 Oh, you should be able to see this. There we go. The number of rows to return, there's a little bit of still up there somewhere.
3:16 There's a lot of information here. There we go. So we have row number, column number, and right here, okay, here at the very top get range, we have these options.
3:27 So we can o we have the option of only doing two. We also have the option of doing three variables or three items elements in here.
3:36 We can say the number of rows, let's say 20 rows. We also have the option to add a fourth thing, which is the number of columns.
3:44 And we can add any number of columns. One, one will be on row one, column one and it will, the range will take 20 rows and 20 columns.
3:56 We can also do two or we can also just do one, one row and one column maybe we wanna do 20 rows and one column.
4:05 So that's one entire range of column, like the K column in fact would be 11 here. So it might be a little hard to discern this, right?
4:17 To figure this out easily Let's my face right away. What might be the most beneficial thing to know, you know how to do range, this sort of row column range is just to try it, right?
4:30 Try to call different ranges like A one B one, BK two or K one or K 33 or F 55 and see if you actually get the correct wooden.
4:42 Try it, try many different ways. Again, just to rehash this, the range has four potential options. Minimum is two. We also can do three or four.
4:52 So we can say row one column, or actually let's do two column a, row two. Column two would be b2.
5:01 But let's say we want to go three rows down and three rows across from starting at b2. And that's what we do here.
5:11 2, 2, 3, 3. So again, try that a few times. What you might get is that right now we are getting a range and we're only getting one value.
5:19 In a later section we'll do get values. So stick around for that. That's gonna be really cool. And we're going to work with our raise.
5:26 That'll be in the next section, but in the next video we will talk more about something else, getting active spreadsheet versus get active sheet.
5:34 It is a a mystery that I was having to dissolve. I had disolve for years, but I want to get you up to date about it faster than I got it.
5:43 So watch out for the next video bite.

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