Bug 154911 - Natural sort columns in pivot table
Summary: Natural sort columns in pivot table
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Calc (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
7.4.6.2 release
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: Sorting
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2023-04-19 15:00 UTC by Grobe
Modified: 2023-05-07 17:29 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
sample spread sheet with simple pivot table to demonstrate issue of non-natural sorting (14.56 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet)
2023-04-19 15:00 UTC, Grobe
Details

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Description Grobe 2023-04-19 15:00:32 UTC
Created attachment 186791 [details]
sample spread sheet with simple pivot table to demonstrate issue of non-natural sorting

Imagine working with counting of electrical components. I find Calc pivot table being a near perfect feature for being able to spot errors. The components are labeled a letter followed by a number, that be C1, C2, . . C50. There are probably other similar use cases.
See attached sample spread sheet.

The issue arrive when counting, and when it turns out the ID are sorted as plain text (e.g. C10 - C19 comes before C2). This has in some cases lead me to believe there is a component missing, when in fact I was not aware of the sort order.

There is a (kind of) workaround, to simply pad the numbers with zeroes (C01 instead of C1). But then it also interrupt with the workflow because every number that I read manually use least possible number of numbers (i.e. no extra zeroes), leading to me tending to increase the typing errors, which in turn cause me to do work over again more often.
This also create issues when I later on want to search for "C1" in main table, when I don't remember that an extra zero is needed.

This is why I'd like to see Libre Office Calc being able to use natural sort in columns of pivot tables, and why manually adding extra zeroes is not a good solution.
Comment 1 BogdanB 2023-05-07 17:23:32 UTC
Also in Autofilter sort.

Version: 7.5.3.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 9f56dff12ba03b9acd7730a5a481eea045e468f3
CPU threads: 16; OS: Linux 5.19; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: ro-RO (ro_RO.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded

For example this list
C1
C10
C2
C20
C21

Should be
C1
C2
C10
C20
C21