Yeah, this ain’t a computer forum. I’m not asking for help. I’m just annoyed that the program’s help ain’t no help.
Thank you for your time.
Office’s help is generally crap.
You just want to swap rows and columns? This functionality is completely buried under Edit|Paste Special…
That’s because there is no spoon.
I have to date used precisely one program (besides games) with a helpful help file. The rest aren’t worth the bytes they’re encoded in. Granted, that doesn’t cover a whole lot, but there seems to be more worthless ones than ones which will actually help you, at least in my experience.
It’s just so poorly done. I’ve got a matrix. I want to transpose it. There is a “transpose” function designed to transpose, at the very least, one-dimensional arrays of cells and, ostensibly, two-dimensional arrays of cells. But no matter how I try to apply the directions, I get gobbelty gook. Their “example” sure as hell ain’t an example. One would think that, at a bare minimum, they’d show a matrix, show the formula needed, and show the result. Nope.
Cool. Thanks! I’ll look for that.
Now I’m even more baffled. Why have a transpose function in formulas at all? It’s so annoying.
I have never transposed a matrix, but I have transposed rows and columns a number of times. It seems like I have to re-learn the function every time, however. You have to use an ARRAY to get transpose to work properly.
Highlight the destination rows/columns
Select the transpose function
navigate to your reference data, [you have to work around the dialog box by dragging it out of the way] and highlight the columns/rows you wish to transpose
don’t press OK just yet
move the cursor up to the Formula Bar and place it between the
= and T
press the COMMAND KEY and RETURN at the same time
Excel should magically transpose the columns or rows you desired
At least that is how it is done on the Mac platform. Isn’t the COMMAND KEY-- ALT in Windows?
Upon further investigation it would appear that you can transpose as many rows/columns into as many columns/rows providing you highlight them correctly. Never needed to transpose more than one row/column at a time. Excel HELP doesn’t seem to explain the ARRAY function <?> very well, IMHO.
I’m with you on that one. Your method seems way too complicated for me to ever use effectively. Fortunately, Terminus Est was exactly correct! I had a 13×12 matrix. I highlighted it and copied it. Then I highlighted an empty 12×13 array of cells and did a right-click to get Paste Special… and at the bottom of the paste-special dialog box is an option to click that will transpose the matrix. I clicked that and voila.
I can see why they wouldn’t want that to be under “transpose” in the help section. :rolleyes:
Glad I could help. Excel likes to pretend that it can do matrix algebra, but setting up arrays (as they are called in Excel) and using array functions is completely opaque.