Sorting data in Open Office
March 26, 2007 5:19 PM Subscribe
Open Office Calc and sorting data question.
I have some Excel spreadsheets I use, but not wanting to pay for excel I am using Open Office 2.0. This is a simplification of the data, but say that you have columns of countries, states, cities, and street names. At the top of each column is a pulldown selection list of the different names in that column. What I used to be able to do in Excel was to be able to pull down the column for say Cities and select the city name, then the pulldown selection lists for the other columns would only show the choices available for the first selection: so only the countries that had that city, and streets that were in that city would be in the other menus, and so on until you had the data rows you wanted according to your known data parameters. I hope that wasn't too horribly confusing. Can Open Office be configured to do this???
I have some Excel spreadsheets I use, but not wanting to pay for excel I am using Open Office 2.0. This is a simplification of the data, but say that you have columns of countries, states, cities, and street names. At the top of each column is a pulldown selection list of the different names in that column. What I used to be able to do in Excel was to be able to pull down the column for say Cities and select the city name, then the pulldown selection lists for the other columns would only show the choices available for the first selection: so only the countries that had that city, and streets that were in that city would be in the other menus, and so on until you had the data rows you wanted according to your known data parameters. I hope that wasn't too horribly confusing. Can Open Office be configured to do this???
Response by poster: OK, data filtering, I should have called it that. OK, so when I do that in Open Office, let's say I select the City, all the other columns all the choices remain, not just the ones for that city. So lets say I selected Springfield as a City, all the other states show up in the States pulldown menu, even ones that don't have a Springfield in them. I do have the pulldown menus, so I am doing the filtering thing...
posted by Eekacat at 6:50 PM on March 26, 2007
posted by Eekacat at 6:50 PM on March 26, 2007
Best answer: No, OpenOffice can't do this. If you read the links you'll see there's a lot of users arguing over it.
posted by anaelith at 7:59 PM on March 26, 2007
posted by anaelith at 7:59 PM on March 26, 2007
Ahh.. I see the difference now (having got myself in front of NeoOffice). OO.o doesn't dynamically update the other filters the way Excel does. How very annoying.
posted by pompomtom at 9:32 PM on March 26, 2007
posted by pompomtom at 9:32 PM on March 26, 2007
Response by poster: Thanks for your help. That is annoying.
posted by Eekacat at 11:40 AM on March 27, 2007
posted by Eekacat at 11:40 AM on March 27, 2007
Response by poster: As an update, the currently free IBM Lotus Symphony does this. I am overjoyed.
posted by Eekacat at 5:22 PM on September 19, 2007
posted by Eekacat at 5:22 PM on September 19, 2007
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Ah, see here.
posted by pompomtom at 5:24 PM on March 26, 2007