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Need advice from statistics-enjoyers (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 months ago by spittingimage@lemmy.world to c/statistics@lemmy.world
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I'm working on a personal project that involves calculating the mean, median and mode of word length in a series of poems. I've imported the first into LibreOffice Calc as a CSV, and have about 600 cells of word lengths.

Calc has Average, Median and Mode functions, but they only accept 255 inputs each. I could split the cells into batches of three and then work with those results, but it feels like that would only let me calculate the overall mean, not the other two figures.

So firstly, am I even using the right tool for this? Maybe there's a better way than using a spreadsheet. And secondly, if a spreadsheet is the best tool, is there a way I can do the calculations I need?

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[-] scrollo@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Using the nltk package in Python is a good start. See this article for starter code.

[-] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

¿Por qué no los Python?

[-] howrar@lemmy.ca 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I've never used Calc, but I find it hard to believe that it can only accept a range of 255 cells. That's an insanely small number of cells.

This is definitely something that should be doable with spreadsheets.

[-] spittingimage@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

I may have been looking at an older version of the LibreOffice wiki.

[-] rImITywR@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

I agree that Python is probably worth looking into.

But looking at the LibreOffice docs, the AVERAGE function can take up to 255 arguments, each "are numbers, references to cells or to cell ranges of numbers". A cell range is a single argument.

To test, I just opened Calc and filled 1000 cells in the first column with random data, and =AVERAGE(A1:A1000) worked fine.

this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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