How to stop Calc from freezing during searches

How do you stop LibreCalc from freezing when you perform any kind of text search?

I have a moderately large spreadsheet, of about 2000 rows x 500 columns.

It’s mostly all numbers, but I have a header column with text.

If I try to search for a specific header text, and there’s a match, Calc responds quickly, presumably because it only needs to search the first row.

However, if I have a typo in my search and it finds no matches in the first row, then Calc freezes for a minute with no way to cancel the search, only to say “Search key not found”. I suspect it’s searching all remaining 1000000 cells, which of course contain no relevant data.

Is this just a basic design flaw of Calc or can I do anything about it? Having the entire UI become unresponsive while it wastes time of a pointless search is immensely frustrating.

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  1. Select row containing the texts. Select cell A1, then Ctrl + Shift + Right Arrow.
  2. Ctrl + H (Find and Replace), Check “Current selection only”.
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