Sorting data in Open Office

March 26, 2007 5:19 PM

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???

posted by Eekacat to computers & internet (6 comments total)

It's called a filter, and I'm sure OO.o has it. (would be a pretty crap excel-replacement if it didn't...)

Ah, see here.
posted by pompomtom at 5:24 PM on March 26, 2007

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

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

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

Thanks for your help. That is annoying.
posted by Eekacat at 11:40 AM on March 27, 2007

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