Possibility to add divide/subtract to cells

[hammerztein]

Support guidelines

• My request extends the functionality of Ocular in a meaningful way.
• I've used the search and this has not been requested before.

Description

• I would like Ocular to be able to accept basic operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide) per cell and it would be correctly summed in the totals/averages.

Solution

It would give more control to the users who split their expenses with their significant others/roommates while maintaining a possibility to see what the real expenses was prior to the split/division

What are alternatives?

No response

Additional context

No response

[simonwep]

Hey! It's already possible to write mathematical expressions in cells (such as 10 + 2) that get evaluated when the cell is blurred - but that's probably not what you meant right? How would you expect this to look like for any given cell? :)

[hammerztein]

Oh my bad, didnt notice the per cell basis operations.
In this case I maybe there could be a possibility to adjust Totals/Averages?
Maybe my problem is niche (hopefully not), but I will try to explain it here.
I have a home expenses category, which I split with my significant other which mean each expense in that category is divided by 2, but if I start to divide the amounts each expense takes I would not see the "actual" expense this particular item may hold in the category in order to track against county/national averages to keep an eye out that maybe Im overpaying my mortage/interest etc.

[simonwep]

Thank you for your explanation! Just for me to get this right, so what you want is something like 50$ in a single cell but in the background only 25$ when it's processed further in any other place? So basically just documenting a category?

Would #123 be a solution to your problem? It covers adding a comment on categories and budgets (not individual cells).

[hammerztein]

Yes exactly, so I would put the entire cost of an expense into a cell, but in the background to be able to adjust that cell "real" value to be in my case half of the input if I choose so, this way I would visually see the differences across multiple years for the full cost of an expense, but when I look at my dashboard the calculation for the yearly savings would be correct since I adjusted "real" value of specific cells to be half of what I inputted there.

Regarding #123 technically yes, depending on the possibility to extend this feature to later maybe compare years/categories ion some graphs or would it be just pure "comment/note" type of feature.

[simonwep]

Gotchya, basically customizing the data that flows into the dashboard views right? What about having a way to customize the dashboard by adding a way to perform transformations based on the data that flows into it? Like saying for category X take the value but divide it by 2 before displaying it and taking it into account everywhere on the dashboard tabs?

#123 is right now just for adding comments, I did some experiments how that'd look like for now but I'm not satisfied with the solutions I've come up so far. I don't want to ship invasive features that might not be as beneficial as they seem... But it'd be just comments, nothing more.

[hammerztein]

Yes giving user more freedom on the dashboard is always good idea, but my main idea was giving a freedom to the "Average" and "Total" fields maybe - this way user could adjust the "formula" (with validations in place obviously) like we do in google sheets/excel ourselves and in order to not break everything that is dependent on these values.

[simonwep]

Hmhm, alright, I think I get it now. I'll see when I can find some time for this - it's a nifty idea but definitely requires some work requirements-wise to not make it too difficult as I'd like to keep it somewhat simple. Although the whole thing started when firefly-iii was too much and google sheet's annual budget planner too little for me 😅

So in your case - differentiating between the "visual" value of what's displayed in a row (months, average, total) and what's actually there would be enough? Like having a row full of 100$ for each month, the total being 1200$ and the average 100$ but when clicking a cell you'd get 200$ because you configured the row to have something like a filter?

[hammerztein]

Yes exactly! The most simple way of describing is (coming from a somewhat aspiring frontend developer 😅) that a cell has a name typeof string and value typeof number maybe, so in this case when Im looking and my yearly overview I can clearly spot the amount that some category cost me, but the actual value would be "behind the scenes" represented in the YoY dashboard in order to give me real "saved" results and also maintaining that visual cue for myself to see what that category might have cost me if I were paying it alone.