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General discussion

I am currently using 2003 MS Excel and am able to filter

Mar 27, 2008 6:43AM PDT

data by selecting in the Custom AutoFilter box with a "contains" information or "ends with".
I am trying to create the same type of filter in Open Office Calc and can't find a way do accomplish the filter. Can somebody point me to the correct way to filter my information.

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Re: filtering in OpenOffice Calc
Mar 27, 2008 7:40AM PDT

The trick is to use regular expressions. They are much more powerful than what Excel offers. But it takes some learning. Regular expressions are originally a programmers tool, not an enduser tool.

Select the range, setup autofilter and choose standard.
Then enter the field name, the condition (=) and the expression to search for. The most important thing: click More... and check "regular expression".

Contains abc = .*abc.*
Ends with abc = .*abc$

It's clearly explained in http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/11/using-contains-.html
You might like http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2008/02/how-to-do-regul.html also.

And, by the way, ^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$ filters VALID email-addresses. You can't do that in Excel.
Much more on regular expressions in http://www.regular-expressions.info/

Hope this helps.


Kees


PS. With such a question, better try the Office and Productivity Software forum.

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(NT) Hi Kees, that really does help, thx
Mar 27, 2008 9:17AM PDT