Let’s say you have a column of 10 cells (Rows 1-10) and you want to find the sum. You click cell 11 (where you want to display the sum) and hit the SUM (sigma) radio button. Calc will automatically highlight all 10 entries in the cells above. That’s fine if you want to sum ALL of the cells. But what if you want to sum only 8 of the 10 and perhaps they are not all contiguous? I cannot figure out how to just include the desired cells! Excel is so very easy. You just hold the CTRL key down and click on each cell that you want to include in the sum. No gymnastics…it just works and so simple. Why can’t Libre Calc do this? What am I missing?
OK…it’s not so hard after all. First left click on the cell where you want the sum and then click the SUM radio button. Next, left click on the first cell to be included in the sum. Then, hold the CTRL key down and left click on any other cells that you want to include, even non-contiguous cells. Click ENTER to calculate the sum. Alternatively, use the SHIFT key to select a range of contiguous cells. You can mix the SHIFT and CTRL keys to select both contiguous and non-contiguous cells. One advantage of Excel is that selected cells remain highlighted for easy visualization of what’s included in the sum whereas Calc does not and you have to read the cell row/column characters as listed in the function which can be very tedious.