How to order a table by multiple columns?

[andreyuhai]

Hey there,

I’ve got a CSV file with 161K rows and 262 columns. Each column is a month of a year starting from 01/99 to 07/20.
Each cell in the table has cumulative entry counts since 02-1999 written by some user.
I want to create a racing bar graph from this table but I can’t use the file as is, because that causes my browser to crash.

| nick   | user_id |  01-1999 | 02-1999 | 03-1999 | 
|--------|---------|----------|---------|---------| 
| john   | 94876   | 10       | 15      | 25      | 
| jayne  | 559493  |  3       |  5      |  5      | 
| curtis | 99213   | 0        | 6       | 30      |  

Meaning that Curtis wrote 6 entries on 02-99 and 24 entries on 03-99. 

My question is that how can I sort these rows so that I do not miss any information and that I could just pick the top 10K rows or so?

For example, if I only sort by the column 01-1999 curtis would be on the last row just because he had no entries on 01-1999. Considering that I’ve 161K rows like this I can’t figure out the order. Adding all the columns in the sort dialogue doesn’t help because then Libre Office crashes.

[anon73440385]

Adding all the columns in the sort dialogue doesn’t help because then Libre Office crashes.

Then you got hit by a bug, which needs to be reported and fixed, because that’s the way to do it and using an implemented function causing a crash is a bug - report here

Please tell us about your LibreOffice version and your operating system

[andreyuhai]

Can’t really check the LibreOffice version but I am using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Once I am able to check it I will edit my question with the LibreOffice version.

My LibreOffice version is LibreOffice 6.0.7.3 00m0(Build:3)

[newbie-02]

there are not ‘the!’ top 10k, as it depends which col. you look at,

you’ll defintely loose some information if you shrink the range, i assume you want to loose the neglectable,

( i assume you don’t want to make a 160k row chart or presentation?),

i assume you’d like the winners in the selection, thus start sorting from that end, first sort for col 07-2000,

no computer is unlimited yet, or will ever be, imho your data might stretch the capa of calc,

(i’m in doubt if calc can handle 262 sorting entries, even more problematic with that much rows … but just try,)

as it’s hard to ‘click in’ all these conditions i’d suggest learning to write a macro for it where you can work with loops or copy and paste,

you may also try if filter is useful for you, ‘autofilter’ has a nice ‘top 10’ selection,

[andreyuhai]

You are right. I was wrong trying to sort all these rows at once because in the end I would be losing some “top” users within these dates. I’ve tried a macro as well. That does not work with that many columns either.

What I did was basically to sort all the rows month by month and select the top 10. That way I ended up with 149 unique user data who have been in the top 10 within that time period.