UPCOMING WEBINAR: 10 Market Research Predictions Over the Next 4 Years In addition to supporting all the standard and advanced analyses, Displayr allows you to perform the types of functions that people ordinarily do in Excel (e.g., subtracting one set of numbers by another). This article shows you how to perform:
- Common mathematical analyses using menus.
- Calculations using cells on tables.
- How to use functions (e.g., Sum).
- Performing more exotic calculations using the R language.
- Calculations involving multiple lines of code.
Common mathematical analyses available in menus
If you wish to apply a calculation to one or more variables or tables, you can select them and click the Calculation button.
Perform calculations on the cells on tables
Excel-like calculations, where the inputs are cells in a table, are done by point-and-click.
Use formulas with code completion
In addition to doing simple math, you can also use formulas (e.g., Sum, SumEachRow). A few tips:
- As you type the function, Displayr will present a list of its best guesses and you can click on them (see the screen recording below).
- Displayr cares about capitalization. That is, sum, Sum, and SUM are all different things (and, most of the time you will be wanting Sum).
- The names in the menus match the function names (e.g., SumEachRow is the function for Calculation > Sum Each Row).
- In addition to performing calculations on tables, you can also use functions when creating new variables if you have a Displayr license.
There are 60,000+ functions
Some people ask "Why don't you just use the Excel function names?" and "Why don't you ignore capitalization?". The answer is that Excel supports fewer than 1,000 functions, but Display supports more than 60,000 functions (i.e., in-built formulas, like Sum, SumEachRow, SumEachColumn, Maximum, etc.)
The R language
While we at Displayr have programmed all the commonly used functions, you also have access to all the functions in the R language. This is an extremely popular language, used by data scientists and statisticians throughout the world. This means that there are lots of tools and resources for learning how to write more complicated functions, including:
- Our documentation.
- Searching the web.
- Lots of training courses in R.
It's a complete programming language for data analysis
The examples so far have used a calculation that can be written in a single line. However, if you click Enter on your keyboard, you can add additional lines of code, as illustrated below.
If you're interested in creating ad hoc tables and performing calculations within those, check out How to Use Calculation Grid in Displayr.