[sf-lug] OT: quick and dirty interactive electoral vote calculator

[Matt Price]

On Fri, 2008-11-28 at 00:16 -0500, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> On Sat, 1 Nov 2008, Matt Price wrote:
> 
> > hi sf-lugers,
> >
> > greetings from canada!
> 
> Hey Matt!
> 
> > hope it's ok to ask a quick non-linux question.  I'm just making a quick 
> > US election spreadsheet, with rows for the various states.  I intended 
> > to have a radio button for each row, with the possible values "Obama", 
> > "McCain", amd "Undecided"; depending on the value, the electoral votes 
> > for that state would be added to the electoral college total for Obama, 
> > McCain, or neither.  As far as i can see there's no simple way to do 
> > this in Openoffice.
> 
> A bit late, but:
> 
> I guess without a radio button working (although I have a sense that one 
> could achieve this with OOo scipting maybe?), I would just enter 1 or 0 to 
> mean an Obama win or an Obama loss - or indeed, the string "McCain" or 
> "Obama".  Then you can COUNT() or SUM().

this is essentially what i did; or rather, i just made two columns
(obama/mccain) and put a "1" in the appropriate column when a state was
called.  i liked that because you could see at a glance what the rough
distribution was.  it wasn't perfect, but it also wasn't so bad.  and it
was good enough to make the election come out the right way...

anyway, thanks asheesh, nice to hear from SF, and hope y'all are doing
well out there.  

matt

-- 
Matt Price
matt.price at utoronto.ca