New to LO and was working on a spreadsheet. I entered a number in one cell and text in another. I tried to move the cells down several rows but the cursor is not showing the proper moving symbol for dragging. The only option showing is the cursor changing to a + sign which fills all the cells. I use Excel and Numbers on a Mac OSX 10.9 and have no problem moving and have been using spreadsheets for over 20 years. Any idea what I am doing wrong or any specific setting for this?
I can’t test on a Mac, but on Windows and Linux I find that if I click, drag and release to highlight a group of cells then click in the blue highlighted area, hold the click and drag then the highlighted cells are moved.
Like commenter cameleon below, on my Mac this does not work if selecting only one cell. Dragging one cell only results in selecting more cells; there seems to be no way to “select” only one cell for dragging.
To drag a single cell (on Windows and Linux) click in the cell and hold the button down, drag the cursor into an adjoining cell and back to the original cell, release the button. The cell stays selected, then click in the cell again, hold the button down and drag where you want.
w_whalley workaround works for me (Windows) as click and drag only works when cell(s) are highlighted. The bug / trick is to get one cell only highlighted!
It looks like the original poster and others are skipping a step: shift click.
That’s what enables it to work for me on Windows. If I shift click a single cell, then I can just drag it anywhere.
Operations for marking cells for drag-and-drop are slightly different for a single cell or a range.
See Move single cell in Calc
Cell/s ready for usual drag-and-drop are shown with a different background and border color (light blue).
Single cell
Do one of the following:
- Click, then Shift-click the cell.
- Pressing the mouse button, drag a range across several cells, do not release the mouse button, and then drag back to the first cell. Release the mouse button.
Multiple cells
Simply click and drag across the range.
I’m familiar with this functionality, but it’s not working. When I click the light blue region and drag, the mouse moves as though I didn’t left-click (and hold). I just installed libreoffice 5 on Archlinux.
Same here. ArchLinux with LO 5.0.1. When you left-click and hold, it does not move the cells, it acts as if you didn’t click.
Could make a test on Mac wit LibO 4.0.2 all works normal.
Select area
Click into the area
Move the area
Drop the moved area
doesn’t work for me, after clicking into the area, moving cursor expand the area instead of moving the cell.
Bu if you select multiple cells instead of just one, then you will be able to move them by drag and drop. OpenOffice and Libreoffice have always work like this 
Yes, ROSt52, it works for several cells but the problem only when I want to drag only one cell. I also have this problem, hope I get a solution for that !!
To move a single cell: Select the cell and then SHIFT-CLICK to turn it blue. Then just drag as usual.
To move multiple cells: Select the cells and drag as usual.
HOWEVER, if you have AUTOFILTER enabled on a table, then NOTHING works! The only things you can move will be outside the range of your autofiltered table. You cannot even insert new columns until you release your autofilter.
A no keyboard, one handed action option to select a single cell:
Click in the cell you want to select and, without releasing the mouse (or touchpad) button, move the pointer to a neighbour cell and return to the first, then release the mouse button.