One simple task; count terms in a series to produce a list of popular tags. Two hours later..

[SWC]

I’ve tried FIND, COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTIF, and FREQUENCY.

Some of these work. But then I have to copy the values and apparently I have to do this over 9301 times for every field because the autocalculate in the bottom-right of the cell seems to behave differently from Open Office. I can’t even check this easily, because when I try to send the data over, Libre Office seems to think I need it placed as a bitmap.

So, being stuck with LO, I tried searching existing answers, but somehow they’re all tangential. One particularly deranged answer is a GIF movie. Slightly related, but the text entry box here is slightly narrower than the preview box, so if you want to do any horizontal formatting you’re out of luck because the lines break, as seen above.

Originally the project was a database, but it had to be converted to a speadsheet for similar reasons regarding data access and functions not working as expected. Should I convert it to a writer document and count the terms individually with a notepad and tally, or is there some way to make this suite multiply my labor after all?

Thanks for your attention.

[mikekaganski]

Thank you for this interesting reading!

Actually, I expected to find a question on this Ask site, that I could try answering. But hey, why stick to boring rules! This was really cool, and despite I still don’t know what steps did you do, on what data (a sample file), and what expected, and what got in reality - i.e., all the stuff called “steps to reproduce” - this was a refreshing reading nevertheless!

[dajare]

PLEASE edit your question to provide some sample data – even two or three rows, copied/pasted as code would be sufficient. I think a pivot table could give you what you want, but it’s hard to be sure without knowing what kind of data you’ve got.

[newbie-02]

i suggest adding [solved - unqualified question] to the title …

[Lupp]

I wouldn’t claim to have a full understanding of your question, but you may try the demo I attached to this post to a recent thread in the well structured forum.openoffice.org/en, and then tell me if it helped you.
(The demo was actually made with LibO and works in both branches, of course. You need to permit the execution of “macros”, however, or to move the code to a module of the ‘Standard’ library of your LibreOffice. )