Excel has difficulty in performing the inter-row computation of summary value, because it lacks a smart adjustment mechanism and can only copy the formulas based on their relative positions. Therefore it requires entering the formulas by hand, which is not only a laborious job but easy to get wrong. But in esCalc, you can deal with the problem easily. Please look at an example.
Compute in esCalc the growth rate of the sales of each month on the sales data.
In esCalc, you just need to enter the formula for once to complete the task. For instance, enter (D58-D2)/D2 for February and the result will be shown as follows:
As shown in the above figure, only one step is enough for completing all computations. There’s no need to copy any formula or adjust the formula. For instance, (D113-D58)/D58, the formula of March, completely meets the expectation.
esCalc boasts a unique homocell model in which cells are related not simply by their positions, but by a more complicated connection. Its immediate advantage is the auto-copy of formulas, meaning a formula can be automatically copied to the cell that has the same business role. In the above case, the cells of March, April and other months in which the summary row is located and the cell of February are homocell to each other. So, the formula entered into the cell of February will be auto-copied into the cells of March, April and other months.
Of course, such copying is not the simple movement of relative positions happening in Excel, but a “smart migration”, like the migration of formula from the cell of February to that of March.
With the auto-copy of formulas and smart migration in esCalc, manual work and the probability of making mistakes are greatly reduced.
But it is much more difficult to perform the same operation in Exel.
For instance, the formula of the growth rate in February is (D58-D2)/D2, which is typically the inter-row operation. The problem of Excel lies in that it only supports typing formulas in the cells by hand, instead of copying or dragging them directly to other cells. The following figure shows copying the formula into the cell of March:
Increased 75 times? Obviously wrong! The correct formula should be (D113-D58)/D58, but the formula after copying is (D113-D57)/D57.