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HPR1535: 31 - LibreOffice Calc - Sheet Editing and Navigation

Hosted by Ahuka on 2014-06-20 00:00:00
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This episode covers various editing techniques you might use, including multiple sheets, and adding, removing and hiding rows and columns. We also discuss how to navigate around a multiple sheet spreadsheet.

LibreOffice Calc, like all spreadsheets, contains a large number of cells in various rows, columns, and sheets, and navigating that can get a little tricky. As we saw previously, each cell has an address, which is marked by the column (letters) and the row (numbers), always in that order. But in fact the address can be larger because we never discussed sheets.

By default, when you create a new Calc spreadsheet you will have three sheets in it, which you see as tabs along the bottom of the screen. They will be called Sheet 1, Sheet 2, and Sheet 3 at this point. But these defaults can be changed by going to Tools–>Options–>LibreOffice Calc–>Defaults. On this screen you can decide how many sheets you want to have on a new document. While the default as it comes is three (similar to Microsoft Excel) you can change it. On my copy of Calc I changed it to 1, because most of the time I never need more than one sheet for my work. I can also change the default naming of new sheets here. Instead of each sheet being “Sheet 1″, Sheet 2″, etc. I could make it something else, like “Tab 1″, “Tab 2″. and so on. I never bother with this though, because I will always name my sheets for what they are doing in a given spreadsheet (e.g. look at what I did when I created the simple model for “What-If” analysis.) And if I need to add a sheet, I can just go to Insert–>Sheet to bring up a window to specify where the sheet should go, what it should be named, or even insert a sheet from a file . A CSV file would be a very good choice here, such as if you wanted to bring in data from a database or another spreadsheet for use in the current spreadsheet.

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