Make Office Better
Top tips for the best office programs
LIBREOFFICE CALC & MICROSOFT EXCEL
Use the Filter function to extract spreadsheet data
One of the most useful spreadsheet functions added to LibreOffice 24.8, released in August, is ‘Filter’. This tool, which Microsoft added to Excel several years ago, extracts rows or columns based on specific conditions that you type, saving you from having to scroll through large spreadsheets.
In our example, we want to extract all the data marked as ‘Bills’ from our expenses spreadsheet. We click in the cell we want this data to appear (E4), then type =FILTER(A3:C18,B3:B18='BILLS') – 1 in our screenshot. When we press Enter, Calc adds the curly brackets (also called braces) to the beginning and end of the function.