Add a Column of Numbers
When you have a column of numbers in QuarkXPress, you can add them up by copying the text into Microsoft Word. Here’s a great tip on how to do that, courtesy of Anne-Marie Concepcion www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/:
First you need to prepare Word by putting its hidden “Tools Calculate” function into a menu or toolbar. I recommend adding it to the Tools menu. To do that, choose Tools> Customize> Customize Toolbars/Menus…
Click on the Commands heading, then the Tools item in the Categories column. In the Commands column, scroll down and select Tools Calculate. The next bit is odd: drag the words Tools Calculate onto the Tools menu in Word. Yes, drag it directly out of this modal dialog box and onto the application’s Tools menu. Drop it where you want it to live. (You can also drag it onto any standard toolbar or other menu.) Click OK. It now lives where you dropped it.
Copy the text from your page layout and paste it into a new Word document. If necessary, format the text so that the numbers are in a column. Select the column by holding down the Option or Alt key and dragging across it (that’s a great tip in itself!). Then choose Tools> Tools Calculate. The result will display at the bottom of the document window, and will also be copied onto the clipboard for you to paste into your page layout document.
This tip is just one of many I’ve benefitted from over the years. If you haven’t yet subscribed to Anne-Marie’s free DesignGeek e-newsletter, I highly recommend it.
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
Thanks for the links, Jay!
One thing I found fascinating with this is that Word can act like a calculator.
– Numbers on their own are assumed to have a plus sign in front of them.
– Numbers in parentheses or preceded by a hyphen are subtracted from the total
– Numbers preceded by a forward slash are divisors (the total of the other numbers are divided by that number)
– Numbers preceded by an asterisk are multipliers … iow to multiply the running total by some amount, put an asterisk in front of the number you want to multiply by.
The arithmetic is applied to the running total, going from the top of the selection down. So if you select this:
15
*2
10
… and run Tools Calculate, the answer you get is 40.
If you select this:
15
10
*2
… the answer you get is 50.
You can even mix arithmetic in the same selection. (Though I’ve found some strange answers when divisors are part of the mix … can’t figure out the logic.)
AM
Thank *you* for creating this tip, Anne-Marie. It’s tremendously handy for doing math from numbers in QuarkXPress.
Years ago, I remember someone asking Quark’s founder, Tim Gill, when QuarkXPress would include the ability to add up a column of numbers. He responded that QuarkXPress would never do math. He said that although people get upset when fonts or pictures don’t print right, they get *really* angry when numbers don’t add up correctly. At the time, Windows PCs were having trouble providing correct calculations, so I guess he had a point. (And a sense of humor.)
But they did add the ability to do math in any value field in a dialog box or in the Measurements palette, as you’ve pointed out in your tips for QuarkXPress and the Adobe products.
Personally, I like to use the Calculator in Mac OS X because it has a Paper Tape function that keeps track of all my entry errors — I mean, entries — and it also lets me type over any of the entries to create a new result. Very slick, and not something you can do in the “real” world.
-Jay
Yes, I love the Paper Tape thingie … didn’t know I could type over the entries to get a new result though!
If only you could paste in a column of numbers into Calculator … that’s how I got the idea for the article. I was entering each number from a table column (with about 50 numbers) into the thing. Ridiculous! Word to the rescue…
;-)
AM