The document standards define two styles of wildcard in criteria. LO supports regex, but not the Excel "wildcard" version. The Excel version is a simple subset of REs (but with conflicting syntax). The consequence is that there can be huge differences in the result of a formula using an Excel-style wildcard. For example, =sumif(A1:A10,"paypal*",B1:B10) in Excel will match any cell with the string paypal This formula imports literally into LibreOffice. If regular expressions are turned on, the criteria is interpreted as a RE. However, what the Excel wildcard really means is "paypal.*" Further, Excel uses ? to stand for one character and it uses ~ as the escape character. The criteria are used in the "database" family of functions (and sumif) My request is that there be an preference "use Excel-style wildcards" and that this be enabled by default for spreadsheets in Excel format. I think this would close some potentially subtle but huge incompatibilities.
Hi Tim, I think more than a bug is a request for enhancement. And a duplicate of the bug https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38125 One trick to deal with the issue, instead of directly using the wildcards, have a couple of named cell with the wildcards and change there. e.g cell named "All" with ".*" or "*", and "One" with "." or "?". in the formulas: =sumif(A1:A10,"paypal"&All,B1:B10) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 38125 ***