Libreoffice Calc Freeze First Row

[Alacoque Whitchurch]

Supposeyou have a table in localc where the first two columns contain names of people for example and the other columns some information about each person. If I have too many info columns, I have to scroll to the right to see them. However, I can't then see the names any more (such that it is difficult to see to which person the info belongs).

I get emails from many sources in my job. I recently got one from one of the office supply companies I purchase from, telling me all the wonderful shortcuts that MS Excel has to simplify your work. After reading it, I decided to check LibreOffice Calc and see which ones work there, since I use Calc instead of Excel at work.

If you have a large range of data, you can quickly move to the right, left, top, or bottom by pressing the + arrow key of the direction you want to go. I tried this with my Christmas card addresses, and I should warn you about any empty cells that you may have. I have some addresses that I took out because the people had moved and I didn't have new addresses yet. When I clicked + down arrow in the address column, the cursor went down to the last filled cell in that column, but when I chose the name column, which is all complete, the + down arrow succeeded in going clear to the bottom.

At work, I have a spreadsheet created for my payroll records. In a spreadsheet, anything you need to calculate must have a formula, or you do it yourself and enter the answer. So here, it is Hours Worked times Hourly Wage for one calculation, Calculate Social Security Withheld for another, Sum the Deductions and Subtract Deductions from the Gross Pay for two more! The pay period is twice a month, so for a year there are twenty-four pay periods, and four times twenty-four formula entries. Whew! Let's see if we can do it faster. Put your formula into the first row. In my example, I have entered the formula for calculating Social Security deductions (total wages multiplied by .0765).

Instead of copying and pasting this all the way down, you can click the cell with the formula, which in this sheet is cell H2. Now hold you mouse over the bottom right corner until the cursor turns into a plus sign. Click and drag your mouse pointer down the rows you want the formula in. This will repeat and adjust the formula for each cell in the column. If you have data entered, it will calculate it as well.

When you have many columns and rows of data, it can be difficult to remember what each column is once you scroll down. If you have several data columns that have similar data (like records of month-to-month sales for many people, or sales of individual items), you run the risk of entering the data incorrectly.

Rather than lose visibility of column headings or row names while scrolling, you can Freeze the Cells. To do this, place the cursor below the column heading and to the right of the names. That would be cell B2.

If you have a data group, you might want to try to predict future values. For example, I might have a spreadsheet of employee sales over a 12-month period. It would be helpful to find a trend to see what the future might be.

The first part is the current period we are in, which is cell N1. This is period 13. For this formula to work, you need to have the period numbers like they are in row 1. By putting a dollar sign in front of the 1, Calc will always refer to row 1.

The second part is the range of cells that Calc needs to find the trend for. In this case, the range is cells B2 to M2. You need to put a dollar sign in front of the B to anchor it, so when you copy it across, the first column is always B.

The third part of the formula is the range of the periods to look at: cells B1 to M1. Both the second and third parts need to span the same columns. For this, we need to put a dollar sign in front of the B to make it stay there and in front of both 1s (so it's always looking at row 1).

Once you do this, you can do a quick copy to copy it down the rows and over to the right for period 14 and 15, just like we copied the formula earlier. This will produce a projection of future sales over the next 3 periods.

Pivot TablesIf you have loads of data and it's hard to sift through it all, you might use a Pivot Table. A Pivot Table summarizes a large table of data into a smaller one to see the totals. Let's first look at our table:

This is a table of purchases by employees and their categories and costs. A Pivot Table allows you to summarize it. To create a Pivot Table, place the cursor anywhere on the table where you'd like to summarize. Then click Insert and then Pivot Table.

You will get a small window asking if you want the range chosen by Calc (which is probably all of your data), or if you want to specify a different range, or even select a different source (other than the spreadsheet you have open). I chose Current Selection.

The Pivot Table window will appear. Up at the top, you are given your fields and you should drag them to the appropriate box to display your summary. What I want to do is see the totals spent for the four categories Machinery, Supplies, Labor and Miscellaneous. To do that, I will drag the field named "Type" to the Row Fields box so the types will be in my table, one to a row. Then I will drag the field named "Cost" to my Data Fields box. It should show up with the word Sum as well.

You need to expand the Options and Source and Destination sections at the bottom. You have several options, but I just want the sum of each type, so I will choose "Total Rows". Also, the range of the table should be filled in. If not, fill it in manually. Then you can choose to display your data on a New Sheet or in a Selection on the same sheet. If you choose Selection, you can shrink the window and highlight the selection where you want the data to appear. I chose New Sheet.

Now, if I want a summary of how much each person spent, I would drag the field "Name" to the Row Fields box and "Cost" to the Data Fields box. The result is a list of how much each person spent on another sheet. If you like, you can always copy everything over to the first sheet (or in your configuration window, you can choose range destination and select the cells on sheet one).

LO Calc is a great tool! The wonderful programmers for this office suite have labored long and hard to make sure it will do everything that the higher priced office suite will do, and they are doing an excellent job. One of the things they have done is to make sure that LO Calc is "keyboard compatible" with Excel, which is smart when you consider the market penetration of Excel and the rest of the Microsoft Office suite. This way, when users switch from using Excel to LO Calc, all the keyboard shortcuts that the user was accustomed to using in Excel also do the very same thing in LO Calc. It certainly does everything I need it to do.

I face an issue when opening files with LibreOffice from a mounted remote: When opening a file for the first time, the file is not opened properly. But second time it works fine. (So the workaround is simple, just open the file again.)

Are there work in progress in this area? Should I wait for next beta/release before I test?

I can provide detailed error descriptions and logs from v1.50.2-178-g7125cb10-beta there is a need for it.

Thanks

Test result: Now LibreOffice Calc freezes and crashes when I open an .ods or.xlsx file. It does not happen every time I open such file but it is unstable. I don't have any problem with LibreOffice for local files.

I've the LibreOffice 6.3.4.2.0+ on fc31 xfce, having same problem with the TS. If I copy the file out of the folder and directly edit it, the libre won't crash. This seems only happen for both powerpoint/impress and calc, although not often on impress, but sometimes happen.

I'm using 18.04 (32 bit) since some time, but I just now tried to write something in Libreoffice. It's completely unusable, just randomly freezes my entire computer so that hard reset is required. One cannot predict on which operation it will freeze. I try to Format -> Paragraph having more than one paragraph selected - opens dialog, then freezes. I try to open a second document in a new window, displays first page of the opened document, then freezes. Even after copying some text from one document to another it freezes!

As I mentioned, the only way to get out of the freeze is a hard reset, so it makes the software just unusable. Which makes the system as a whole hardly usable, because to use a text editor I have to switch to another system, for example my old Ubuntu 10.04, where I NEVER EVER experienced such system freeze.

Has anyone else experienced this? Any hints?

My machine is a HP XW4100, so it has a Pentium 4 3 GHz CPU and 2 gigs of RAM. However I don't think it's a problem with resources, because in that case the machine usually would gradually slow down and finally become unresponsive. However, even in that case you could usually switch to the text screen with Ctrl-Alt-F1 (this works on a very low level), login in text mode and kill the processes that are causing the problem.

In my case, I get an instant hard freeze, even when the machine isn't doing anything else. And even Ctrl-Alt-F1 does not work.

I would rather suspect an issue with the graphics driver and some interaction between this driver and LO, because I have an old Nvidia card that Nvidia does not support anymore and I can't use a proprietary driver which I used in 10.04, so I'm using Nouveau.

Writing unsaved data to disk and gracefully restarting is better then a hard restart to prevent data corruption. If the SysRq key combinations doesn't let you get back to a console, at least a graceful restart will write those old logs to disk to find out what caused the freeze, and why LibreOffice.

If you can get things working on Ubuntu-Mate that would be good, but if not this gives you an alternative to try. I use MX Linux on a 32bit netbook - it works well in that setting (Atom processor, 2GB RAM).

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