Calculations

Calculations summarize a property without changing your collection. You can count empty cells, inspect distinct values, total numbers, or count characters and words. The calculation uses the items in your current view, in this order:

• Selected items, if any
• Otherwise, items matching the current filter or search
• Otherwise, all items in the collection

Perform a calculation

Click a property column header and select Perform calculation. Choose a calculation in the drawer to see its result.

Available calculations depend on whether the property contains text or numbers.

For an imported numeric CSV, the sum, minimum, maximum and average walkthrough shows the number-column setup and a worked example. Check empty cells before interpreting the average.

Calculations available for all data types:

• Count Empty - How many items with an empty value for the property.
• Count Filled - How many items with a value for the property.

Calculation available for text-based data types

Characters count

Returns a total across the text cells in the current calculation scope. For each cell, Datablist trims leading and trailing whitespace, removes line-break characters, then adds the remaining string length. Spaces between words and digits count; line breaks do not. Number values in a Number property are not text for this calculation.

The length uses JavaScript's UTF-16 code units. A visible symbol can contribute more than one unit: 😀 contributes two, while the joined 👩‍💻 emoji contributes five. This is not a count of visible symbols or file bytes.

For example, a scope containing the last four rows above totals 12. If another tool enforces a per-cell length limit, check its own counting rule and each affected cell; this calculation is an aggregate and excludes line breaks.

Words count

Return the number of words found in texts. Words are split using spaces. Compound words such as "rule-breaking" count for 1 word.

• Punctuation characters are excluded from the word count. In the French sentence (In French, we have a space before punctuation letters) "Quel est ton nom ?", the word count is 4 ("quel", "est", "ton", "nom").

• Numbers are counted as words. In the text:

  My phone number is 04 38 58 19 38.
  

  The word count is 9.

• Spaces before or after a text are ignored, and multi-space characters are ignored. In the text:

      Datablist        is great    
  

  The word count is 3 ("datablist", "is", "great").

Count distinct values

Return facets for a property with how many times each value appears. This is great for aggregation of limited choice values (countries, status, etc.).

The CSV distinct-value example shows how case, surrounding spaces and the empty bucket affect the counts.

The distinct values calculation has two settings:

• Splitting Rule: When enabled, each value is split into terms using a separator. Then the terms are counted.
• Case-sensitive: Check this setting to keep the default text case during text comparison. When enabled, Paris and PARIS would be counted as two distinct values. If disabled, Datablist converts all values to lowercase before doing the aggregation.

Note: Leading and trailing spaces are removed during the processing.

The drawer displays up to 10,000 distinct values, ordered by their count. If there are more, it shows a warning and omits the remaining values from the displayed result.

Distinct values can be exported in Spreadsheet format (with columns and rows), or as a comma-separated list.

Use Spreadsheet Format to paste the results into a new Datablist collection (see import with copy/pasting) or a spreadsheet. The comma-separated list works with the In and Not in filter operators (see filtering).

Calculation for number-based data types

• Min - Return the lowest value for the property.
• Max - Return the highest value for the property.
• Average - Divide the sum by the number of numeric values that contributed to it. Empty cells and values stored as text are ignored; zero is included.
• Sum of values - Return the sum of values.