Using color to mark up data for significance makes some sense.
Using such coloration as a condition for sort, filtering or summaries is a bad idea, because color is not an exact value.
Color is a visual clue. Vision varies from person to person, depends on lighting situation (white balance and such) and may be perceived differently depending on previous eye exposure. Also, color is a product of 3 or 4 distinct magnitudes (Luminance/hue/saturation, 3 additive primaries or 4 subtractive primaries) which can sometimes yield similar coloration (to our perception) from very different magnitudes.
In other words: Creating a solution which makes sense to the average user is a fairly overwhelming task. Also, because the input is not deterministic, it is not good input for a typical spreadsheet task. With limited developer resources available, this is not likely to be given priority.
Yes, there is a hack, as I have seen mentioned. No, I will not search for it and test it for you. Do a search. You are likely to find ut.
If you must do things the Excel way (be it out of own desire or client demand), at best use Excel.
This is not a good title. Please change it so that it summarizes the question. Then provide more details in the question body. Is this cell background color or text color, and are styles involved? Also, give an example of how the colors should be sorted. What colors come first?
The question seems clear enough to me. Excel has had this for some time now...after setting up auto-data filters to column tops, on pulling down any of those column-heading menus, one will see an obvious "sort by color..." option that's not in the same place in Calc, if it exists anywhere. It lets the user filter cells by color, of course, which is a great visual method I use for tagging rows I want to follow up on. I'll keep looking.
@Dave S: Why don't you open a new question and add a link to this one? First, take a look at guidelines for asking. Recognize that many of us do not use Excel, so be sure to explain exactly what is needed.
Question reformulated
The question is formulated bad in the sense that all the question is fit into the title, and the description is almost empty, while it should be like this:
e.g.
Sort or filter by cell background color in Libreoffice Calc
(so it gives a brief idea what it is about)Just a style issue, not a big deal :-)
And no, there's no such feature yet... tdf#76258, tdf#95520.
If there was such a feature it would encourage users to code relevant information using CellBackColor instead of explicit cell content. Such ways of "coding" are bad and dangerous for many reasons.
In addition users filtering by color would very likely also expect the filter to work with conditionally applied (CF) colors not understanding the difference. If I am asked I will opt against such a feature.
I'm having a devil of a time transitioning to Calc from Excel without this functionality. Filter is not good. The Remove Duplicates extension also does not do quite what I'm used to and need. The combination of Conditional Formatting and Sort by Format does what I need. Conditional Formatting highlights the duplicate values, then Sort by Format brings them to the top for analysis where I can manually sort them into two groups: one group where one instance will be removed, and the other group where both instances will be removed. Anyone got a way in LibreOffice to do that doesn't involve a big tutorial on calculations?