Intro to formulas

Irelia has a powerful data engine to calculate the cells of your tables using formulas. If you’ve used spreadsheets before, or database expressions, you’ll be on familiar territory - but there are some wrinkles you’ll want to know about, so hang around.

Let’s start with the classic use of spreadsheets. Suppose you have a list of products you’ve ordered, the quantity you ordered, and the unit price of each. You’ve made a column to show the quantity times the unit price, but want the computer to do that part for you.

Column behavior

When we provide a formula for a column we tell Irelia to update its value on every change in a document. We can no longer type a value into the cell because its value is determined purely by the formula.

A formula column is one of three possible column behaviors, which you can control using the COLUMN BEHAVIOR section in the creator panel:

• Data column maintains data, which you can manually update or clear, or optionally calculate using trigger formulas.

• Formula column always reflects the result of formula calculation, and is kept up-to-date by Irelia.

• Empty column is a state for a new column. Typing any value into it will turn it into a Data Column, while typing in a formula will turn it into a Formula Column

Using the COLUMN BEHAVIOR section, you can manually change the column behavior. The most common options are available as green action buttons at the bottom, and other options are available under the behavior menu. Depending on the current column behavior, those are:

• Set formula action converts an empty column to a formula column.

• Set trigger formula or Convert to trigger formula action sets a trigger on a column.

• Make into data column action converts an empty column to a regular data column.

• Convert column to data converts a formula column to a regular data column.

• Clear and make into formula clears all the data in a column and converts it to a formula column. (We say "clear" as a reminder that existing data in the column will be lost. They’ll be replaced by the calculation results from the formula.)

• Clear and reset clears all data and completely resets the column to its initial Empty Column state.

Code Viewer

Once you have a lot of formulas, or if you have been invited to a document and want to get an overview of its formulas, there is a code viewer available with a pure Python summary of the document.