The Final List

In our list, we need to add in our additional two “Question” columns so create two more “Choice” columns (in the same fashion as the existing “Hungry” and “Thirsty” columns) called “Tired” and “Sick”.

Modify the “Column Ordering” to display the items on the “New Item” form in the correct order:

Modify your view to display the fields in the same order:

Create several items on the list to cover the range of all possible answers (Hint – use the “Truth Table” as a reference when creating the items):

Based on our “Truth Table”, we can see that our logic does indeed catch each and every possible result (with the addition of displaying a result even if fields were skipped).

Conclusion

So what do we do with all of this?  What I’ve shown are obviously just simple examples using questions that aren’t exactly “Business Data”, but hopefully they will still serve as a foundation for how to begin building out formulas for your own needs.

Using the method of building out a “Truth Table” then a “Flowchart” for each and every nested formula may not always be the best approach for you given the time it takes to build them out, but as the complexity of your formulas increase, you might find that having them can decrease the “headache-time” of debugging and troubleshooting when your logic goes awry.

Hints:

• Use Excel to quickly build out a “Truth Table” when needed (since it’s nothing more than columns and rows anyway)
• And Visio (or a piece of scratch paper in a pinch) for quickly building hierarchical flowcharts (OpenOffice.org is another great option if you don’t have the budget for MS Office).

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get into the alternate use of the “AND” and “OR” functions for testing multiple conditions in an “IF” formula (that was my original plan), but that is next on my list so I’ll make sure and cover those in the next article.

Till next time…

- Dessie

Dessie Lunsford
Points-of-Sharing