The Math Column allows you to perform instant calculations on the data in your table, from basic arithmetic functions to more complex ones. You can then show the output in different components in your app and see the output instantly.
Configuration
Once you've added the Math Column, you need to configure your calculation or formula.
To use the math column, write your calculation or formula in the top field and then add replacements so that your calculation works for every row.
For example, here, we’ve written Q * P and replaced Q with Quantity and P with Price — and the result is that every row has a new value for quantity * price.
As you start typing in the Configuration field, Glide will guess which column you are referring to and add a new replacement. But you can easily change what is being replaced.
You can also replace parts of your formula with other values such as the values from the User Profile table or the value of Now, which is very useful for date calculations.
You can write whatever text you want and replace it. It doesn’t have to be short or resemble the names of your columns.
Supported Calculations
The Math column works with the following calculations.
Simple math
+ ADDITION - SUBTRACTION * MULTIPLICATION / DIVISION ^ EXPONENTIATION () PARENTHESIS
Functions
LOG ABS MIN MAX FLOOR CEILING ROUND TRUNC ASIN COS ACOS ATAN MOD SECOND MINUTE HOUR DAY WEEKDAY MONTH YEAR
Date & Time Math
The Math column can also do calculations with Dates & Times. For example, subtracting two dates/times produces a duration.
The Now value makes it really easy to work out the time until something or how long ago something was.
Now - Datewill give you how long ago a date is (if that date is in the past)Date - Nowwill give you how long until a particular date (if that date is in the future)
When the output of your math column is a date/time value you will also be able to format it.
Duration value
In Google Sheets, it may not be obvious, but dates are actually stored as numbers. It’s not until cells are formatted as Dates that we can actually read the day, month, year, and time of day from the data.
In Google Sheets, Date Values are long strings of numbers that represent the number of days since December 31st, 1899. For example, the number 1, when formatted as a date, will display as December 31, 1899.
If you’re working with a value that has a date and time, the Date Value will contain a decimal value that represents the portion of a single day. For example, December 31, 1899 12:00PM would be represented by 1.5 if the cell is formatted as a number.
If you’re working in Excel, the Date Value is calculated one day later than in Google Sheets. That is, in Excel, the number 1 represents January 1, 1900 (and not December 31, 1899).
Durations using the Math Column in Glide
In Glide, we can use the Math column to calculate the difference, or Duration, between dates. By default, Glide will display the duration in this format: HH:MM:SS (Hours:Minutes:Seconds), which is the same format as you’d see in Google Sheets when formatting as a Duration.
If we need this data to be displayed differently, we can use some familiar Math functions. For example, by using the FLOOR function, we can display the duration as the number of days as opposed to hours.
Ways to use the Math column
Here are some of the most common ways to use the Math column in your projects, beyond simple calculation.
How many days ago/until
As we mentioned, the Now value enables you to calculate the duration between now and the past, or now and the future.
The problem with this though is that the output is a duration type, which is not necessarily that readable.
We can use floor() to reduce this to the number of days since/until another date. We can do this by surrounding our original calculation with floor. Now we can use this value in our project and it will update as time progresses. C
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Get the year
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Percentage completed
Let’s say we have a list of projects & tasks. When someone completes a task, the completed column is marked true.
In the project table, we have a relation bringing back all the tasks for that project.
First, we’ll create a rollup using that relation and count all the tasks with the value of true.
Next we’ll create another rollup counting all the unique tasks so we have the total number of tasks in that project (completed or uncompleted)
Finally, we’ll add a math column that calculates the percentage. We’ll write Completed/Total*100 and make sure that Completed and Total are replaced by the correct columns.
Then we can change the precision to 1 and add the percentage sign.
Now we can add a text component in our app, showing the progress on each project.
