Basic Aggregations
Learn key insights from the datasets by calculating essential summaries like totals, averages, and counts.
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Often, when we first look at a large dataset, it can feel overwhelming. We see rows and rows of individual pieces of information, but how do we make sense of it all? The first step is usually to get a high-level summary that tells us about the whole picture, not just individual details. What are the total sales for the month? What’s the average customer rating? How many products do we have in stock? These kinds of questions are answered through basic aggregations. They help us condense vast amounts of data into simple, digestible numbers, providing immediate, actionable insights.
In this lesson, we’ll explore the fundamental Google Sheets functions that allow us to quickly calculate these essential summaries.
Summing values
Imagine we’re a small business owner, and at the end of the day, we want to know our total sales revenue to see if we met our target. Or perhaps we’re managing a project budget and need to quickly sum up all the expenses incurred so far to see where we stand. The SUM() function is our go-to for adding up all the numbers in a specified range of cells, giving us that crucial grand total.
It primarily takes one or more numbers or ranges as parameters. The most common way we’ll use it is with a single range.
range: This is the group of cells (e.g.,B2:B100) that contains the numbers we want to add together. ...