Please add a feature to Calc that auto-fills cells based on context of neighbouring cells and examples of correct entries by the user. Spreadsheet cell content usually follows a certain pattern and it is a frequent use case that part of this pattern is needed for further analysis in other cells. LibreOffice Calc should be able to automatically extract/autofill the relevant piece of the neigbouring cell content based on examples entered by the user. Example 1: I want to fill the last name in column B based on the full name in column A. COLUMN A COLUMN B Bjoern Michaelsen Bjoern Armin le Grand Armin Katarina Behrens Katarina András Timár ? Michael Meeks ? Tomaž Vajngerl ? Caolan McNamara ? I give three examples and expect Calc to fill the remaining cells in column B correctly based on my example. Example 2: I want to fill the first character of the last name in column B based on the full name in column A. COLUMN A COLUMN B Bjoern Michaelsen M. Armin le Grand G. Katarina Behrens B. András Timár ? Michael Meeks ? Tomaž Vajngerl ? Caolan McNamara ? I give three examples and expect Calc to fill the remaining cells in column B correctly based on my example. Example 3: I have variable names which follow a certain pattern in column A and I want to extract the middle part for column B: COLUMN A COLUMN B aw16_treatA_total treatA ch28_ebsoZ_total ebsoZ adi43_treatZ_other treatZ ch45_treatAA_beso ? zh123_midA_total ? ph45_midZZ_other ? sdi345_treatT_total ? I give three examples and expect Calc to fill the remaining cells in column B correctly based on my example. The requested enhancement corresponds to the "Flash Fill" feature introduced with MS Excel 2013. For more information, see: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-AutoFill-and-Flash-Fill-2e79a709-c814-4b27-8bc2-c4dc84d49464
Example 1 =LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A1)-1) Example 2 =MID(A2,SEARCH(" [^ ]*$",A2,1)+1,1) & "." (RegEx has to be enabled in Tools > Options; splitting names is always a tricky task and you likely fail like in this example) Example 3 Either use Find() repeatedly parametrized with the first occurrence of the underscore or Search(). It's not completely clear if the string may contain more than two underscores. What I want to demonstrate is that Calc has powerful methods to do what you want without automatic processing. The request is not defined precise enough to get implemented. My take: WORKSFORME. May Q decide.
Thanks Heiko for looking into this enhancement request. I am aware of the use of complicated functions that lead to "almost" the same results. However, what I point to is the automatic filling based on neighbouring cell content without using any function. An enhancement with substantially better user experience. I suggest you to look at the video "Flash Fill" which you find in the web link of the bug report. This illustrates quite nicely the type of enhancement which I request. In my job, I use LibreOffice Calc and Excel 2013 everyday, for many different use cases. Working with data (numeric or text) the Flash Fill feature of Excel extraordinarily increases productivity. I request a similar enhancement to LibreOffice.
I think this might be something near: https://github.com/dennisfrancis/AutoFillMissingData
Hi Francis, I added you to this bug entry with regard to Auto filling cells by example. Could you please have a look at comment 3 where Buovjaga mentions your extension as potential solution to this bug? Thanks in advance.
moving to new