I’m doing social media statistics. While importing and combining CSV-files from Facebook/Instagram to Excel is a hurdle, importing to Grist was simple and smooth. So far so good.
But I have trouble adjusting to how formulas in Grist work. I tried to read the documentation, but I don’t understand it. This should be rather basic, but I don’t get it.
I want to have a summary of the data imported from Facebook and Instagram, preferably shown in a table of it’s own.
In Excel I can do:
=COUNTA(‘Post_ID_FB’) and get the number of Facebook posts (using a named range for column with unique Facebook posts IDs)
and =AVERAGE(‘Reach_FB’) to get the average reach (again using named ranges).
Then I can get a simple table that shows the number of Facebook posts last year and their average Reach.
What I don’t understand in Grist is how to refer to the colums in the same way. How do I get the same simple table in Grist?
In Grist, you use Summary Tables, i.e. add a widget to a page (or as its own page) that shows your data grouped by some field – or grouped by no field, to get overall totals.
For overall totals, it’ll be a table consisting of a single row. By default this row will contains SUMs of numeric columns, but you can change those to averages or other stats, or add more columns. If you’d like those numbers shown under each other (rather than horizontally as a row), you can use a Card widget for this summary table.
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Thanks, now I see why I didn’t get it. I added a “Group by” to the Summary table, which meant that I didn’t get the totals.
It makes sense, but it wasn’t intuitive for me that I didn’t have to add the “Group by”. Without adding that, I got what I wanted.
So now I have the summary of each table. If I want to show the summary of Facebook posts and Instagram posts in the same table, how do I do that?
That’s the perfect use for a “Group By” column! 
Ideally, you’d have a table that has Facebook data and Instagram data in different rows, with a column like Platform that has values like “Facebook” or “Instagram” to distinguish them. Then when you add a summary of that table grouped by Platform, you’ll see two rows, one with totals for “Facebook” and the second for “Instagram”.
But I have Facebook and Instagram data in different tables (CSV exports), so I can’t use Group by.
I want to combine the summarized data from the two (three) different tables in a new table so that I get the totals in one place.