An introduction to the spreadsheet view
With release 4.0, the spreadsheet feature of GeoGebra has become much more robust. I find it is particularly useful for doing statistics. In this tutorial we will simply look at using the spreadsheet as a spreadsheet.
To open the spreadsheet view, go to the view menu, and check “Spreadsheet”. We will also deselect the graphics view for the time being.
When the spreadsheet is the active view, you should notice that the icons in the toolbar have changed.
This is a different behavior from what we saw with just the algebra and graphics view. In the spreadsheet view we have 4 tool icons visible. The first tool is the selection tool. The next three icons each have a small triangle in the lower left corner indicating that they represent a menu of icons. These menus can roughly be described as a menu for statistics, a menu for turning data in the spreadsheet into objects in the algebra and graphics view, and a menu for simple statistics on a column or row.
You should also notice the toggle icon to the upper right that lets you add a style bar to the spreadsheet view. We want to click that icon to see the style bar.
On the style bar, there are icons for bold and italics print, as well as for the various justifications of the entries in cells. We will click the first icon which produces an input bar.
The spreadsheet in GoeGebra follows many of the conventions of other spreadsheets. If we want ot fill in a large number of entries that follows a regular pattern, we can use quick fill. To use quickfill, we enter the first 2 entries, then shift and drag to highlight both cells.
If we put the cursor over the little blue box in the lower left corner of the selected cells, the cursor changes to a small cross. Clicking and dragging fills in the values with the arithmetic sequence.
If we want to look at the formulas in the spreadsheet, it is useful to change the Algebra Descriptions under the options menu to see commands.
This lets us see that the formulas for the cells that have been filled in.
The spreadsheet in GeoGebra follows the usual spreadsheet conventions for absolute and relative cell references. To create a chart of powers of numbers A^B, we start with the frame that lists the A’s in the first column and the B’s in the first row. We add an entry where the column is absolute for the base and the row is absolute for the exponent.
We then use quick fill to complete the chart.
It is useful to know that copy a region from an Excel worksheet and paste it into the spreadsheet in GeoGebra.
One way that the spreadsheet in GeoGebra differs from traditional spreadsheets is that we can send data from the spreadsheet to the algebra and graphics windows. Entries in the spreadsheet are considered auxiliary objects, so they do not show up in the algebra window unless we select the icon for auxiliary objects.
When we click the toggle the entries become visible.
If we select the 5 by 2 set of numbers in the spreadsheet, we can save it as a list of 10 numbers, as a list of 5 points, as a 5 by 2 matrix, as a 5 by 2 table text, and as a polyline with the points as vertices.
We can also use items from the algebra and graphics windows in the spreadsheet view. They generally show up the same way they would appear in the algebra window using LaTeX. One exception is the tabletext from exported tables. It shows up as a LaTeX string.
© Mike May, S.J., 2011
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, Mike May, S.J. maymk@slu.edu
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