Calc Guide

You can use the intersection operator to refer a cell in a cross
tabulation in an understandable way. If you have columns labeled
'Temperature' and 'Precipitation' and the rows labeled 'January',
'February', 'March', and so on, then the following expression
'February' ! !Temperature'
will reference to the cell containing the temperature in February.
The intersection operator (!) should have a higher precedence than the
concatenation operator (~), but do not rely on precedence.
Tip
Always put in parentheses the part that is to be calculated first.
Relative and absolute references
References are the way that we refer to the location of a particular cell
in Calc and can be either relative (to the current cell) or absolute (a
fixed amount).
Relative referencing
An example of a relative reference will illustrate the difference
between a relative reference and absolute reference using the
spreadsheet from Figure 131.
1) Type the numbers 4 and 11 into cells C3 and C4 respectively of
that spreadsheet.
2) Copy the formula in cell B5 to cell C5. You can do this by using a
simple copy and paste or click and drag B5 to C5 as shown below.
The formula in B5 calculates the sum of values in the two cells B3
and B4.
3) Click in cell C5. The formula bar shows =C3+C4 rather than
=B3+B4 and the value in C5 is 15, the sum of 4 and 11 which are
the values in C3 and C4.
In cell B5 the references to cells B3 and B4 are relative references.
This means that Calc interprets the formula in B5 and applie it to the
cells in the B column and puts the result in the in the cell holding the
formula. When you copied the formula to another cell, the same
procedure was used to calculate the value to put in that cell. This time
the formula in cell C5 referred to cells C3 and C4.
Chapter 7 Using Formulas and Functions 189