open-ended data sorting
OS: OpenSuse Leap 15.1
LibreOffice Version: 6.4.4.2
File Format: .ods
I made an account here specifically to ask this question, and I apologize if it's actually a ridiculous question--basically, there's something very specific I want to try to set up in this spreadsheet, but I'm not 100% sure it's even possible to do how I'm imagining.
I want an easy utility to help me organize these online raffles I help manage. I want to be able to sort by prize, or by winner, but without needing to format all the winners in advance. There's a static number of prizes that are the same every time, while participants tend to drop in and out depending on availability, which makes maintaining a list of winners really unwieldy. The prizes are basically the only static data, with the participants being the open-ended variables that are vexing me.
There's the basic spreadsheet where I collect data, organized by prize, like so:
That's the easiest way to keep track of who's getting what on the fly, since these get pretty fast-paced. But for actually handing out the prizes, it's easier to track everything by member name (since it's digital stuff I'm handing out to specific accounts). So maybe on a separate sheet, I want to devise some kind of formula that will look at the entries (the names) and print the column they appear under, e.g:
Name1: Prize1
Name2: Prize1, Prize3
Name3: Prize2, Prize3
And so on. Being able to sort the raw data like this would be super-convenient in larger giveaways, but I can't seem to find a good way to rig this. I'm asking this here because I'm notoriously bad about overthinking things and I'm sure there's some very simple solution to this problem that I'm missing. That solution might even be 'why don't you just use [x thing] instead'.
Thanks in advance for the advice/metaphorical slap upside the head, and my apologies if I've committed some question-asking faux pas here.
Lets see if i got this right. You manually maintain a table as show in your picture and you would like to generate a table as you described below, which is "automatically" updated as you change something in the manual table correct ?
It doesn't necessarily need to be automatic or update in real-time, I'm just wondering if there's any kind of...I don't know, filtering system that can do that for me when I need it.
How to handle the case where one person (NameX) won the same prize more often than once?
In what way id the task actually related to sorting? Is it about sorting the prizes won, about the names, about what else?
Is there an already prepared list of names occurring at least once, or are the names always to be extracted from the three (or more?) columns?
That is an interessting question, my current solution does not add any quantifier to the persons if they are found multiple times, but that should also be possible todo with another integer array to keep track of the number of accurances of each person for each price column. If any interesst for this extended solution exists, i think i could add it on request.