It is rather inconvenient to summarize details in Excel. You can only enter the formulas by hand when beyond-the-group computation is involved, which is not only a laborious job but also easy to get wrong. This is because Excel lacks the smart adjustment mechanism and only supports copying formulas mechanically according to their relative positions.
While using esClac, you can deal with the computation easily. Let’s look at an example.
Compute the ratio of each order to the sales of each product. You will see hundreds of kinds of them after performing summarizing by products, as shown in the following:
The ratio of order 11820 to the sale of Apple juice is =D3/D2. Enter the formula into E3 and the result is as follows:
As you can see, the formula has been applied to every order of the Apple juice intelligently and works out the corresponding ratio correctly.
The smart copying can really reduce the workload. But if the formula still needs to be entered by hand when you move on to deal with the next product, maybe you don’t think esCalc has really great computational ability. So let’s check the formula for E47 to find out the truth:
D47/D46！It is correct. The formula has been adjusted intelligently!
This means that once a formula is entered in esCalc, it will be automatically copied to other cells requiring the same kind of computation and adjusted intelligently to conform to algorithmic logic. This will reduce the manual work as well as the error probability to the greatest extent possible.
It is much more difficult to perform the same computation in Excel. For example, you enter formula D3/D$2 into E3 in Excel and copy it to E4, E5 up to E47 (where the next product Barbecue sauce begins). You will find the results are all right until E47, where the wrong formula D47/D$2 is used. The correct one is D47/D$46. But you must handle the problem by hand.
If there are hundreds of products, maybe you need to enter hundreds of formulas into the computer by hand, let alone each formula requires copying dozens of times. The job is utterly laborious and extremely easy to get wrong as well.