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Working with cell addresses

The address of a cell in Google sheets can be specified in two ways: either as a letter-number pair like C5, or as a pair of numbers like "row 5, column 3". Some formulas may be easier to specify on one way or the other, so it's useful to know how to convert from one form to the other and back.

  • ROW() and COLUMN() take addresses in A1 format and return the number of the row and column respectively.
  • ADDRESS() takes numeric row and column inputs and returns the address in A1 format. It also has an option argument to specify the relativity of the addresses: 1 (the default) returns absolute addresses; 2, 3, and 4 return row absolute, column absolute, and relative addresses respectively.

In this chapter you'll be working with Indian butterfly data from Singh and Pandey.

This exercise is part of the course

Intermediate Google Sheets

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Exercise instructions

  • In column H, get the row numbers of the Locality column.
  • In column I, get the column numbers of that column.
  • In column J, convert columns H and I back to addresses in $A$1 absolute format.
  • In column K, convert columns H and I back to addresses in A1 relative format.

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