CHOOSECOLS

I have been putting together a data dashboard for my school for two years, and you'd think I would have had this figured out by now, but I didn't - the grades 1-12 all work out fine and sort nicely, but when I add in our early years classes (KB, KA, PS) those aren't recognized as number so they are put at the end of the list, after Grade 12; not in front of grade 1 where they should naturally reside.

Not knowing how to solve this effectively, I turned to ChatGPT to help me out. 

It suggested I make a helper column, I called it "hidden", and label each grade with its own grade, since the numbers were not a problem, and we needed to convert the "KB", KA, and "PS" text to a numerical value to rank them against other numbers.

I gave them -3 for PS, -2 for KA, and -1 for KB. 

I then used this formula to make the grade for each grade. It reads column B and rewrites the grade in column D for me.

Then I wanted another table with everything sorted. I would have used QUERY, but ChatGPT suggested I use CHOOSECOLS. The reason it said was that QUERY is used to search a database, whereas CHOOSECOLS creates a new array from the selected columns in the existing range.

That was kind of cool - I'd never used that formula before. 

The documentation shows it being used to manipulate data in an already-made table.

Keep a Contact List in a Doc Updated Using Google Sheets

The other day, I was reading our Teacher Handbook. The Teacher Handbook includes names of teachers and what they teach. The problem is that one teacher had changed positions and so the handbook was out of date.

This video shows how to keep documents updated by maintaining a single spreadsheet.