Dear all,
I’m trying to get my spreadsheets to show Dependencies between cells. But although I can get a blue trace arrow with a blue dot or arrow-head to show that a cell has some precedents or dependents by using Tools>Detective, I can’t click on the arrow as the Help menu indicates that I should be able to to show me exactly which are the dependents/precedent cells, as I can in Excel.
According to the Help for Libreoffice Calc, my mouse cursor should change shape when I hover over a trace arrow, allowing me to double-click to get it to show me the dependencies; but it doesn’t change shape. It does change to a ‘paint-pot’ shape when I use the ‘Fill Mode’ option within Detective, but I don’t think this is what I need.
I have the same problem on my new Raspberry Pi 500 and on an older Lenovo laptop on which I have installed Linux Mint 21. Looking at various sources, I have seen a suggestion that my mouse may be wrongly configured, which would be odd as the same problem appears with the laptop trackpad, the proprietary Raspberry wired mouse I bought with the Pi, and a generic wireless mouse that I have connected to try.
Any suggestions gratefully received.
Many thanks in advance!
Paul.
Please include the following information with all inquiries: operating system, LibreOffice version (four digits, e.g., 25.2.5.1), file type in which the file is saved. Thank you.
Thanks very much for the clarification.
LibreOffice version I’m using is 7.4.7.2
File is saved as .ods Open Document spreadsheet
Operating system is Linux Mint 22.1 Cinnamon (Cinnamon version 6.4.8) on my laptop; I’m afraid I’m not absolutely certain which operating system is running on my Raspberry Pi, but it’s a newish machine (December 2025) whose OS was pre-installed, and I think it’s running Raspberry Pi’s own OS, which I gather is based on Debian Linux ‘Bookworm’.
Best wishes,
Paul.
…I’ve just realised from looking at the LibreOffice website that they’re advertising version 25.8! Not sure why I’ve only got version 7.4.7.2… The suite (Base, Calc etc) was also pre-installed on my raspberry Pi, I wonder if Raspberries don’t cope well with later versions…? Or would it be worth trying to download 25.8 and see if it helps, do you think?
I’ve checked my old Lenovo laptop’s software Manager, and have just remembered that when I do this, it says ‘generating cache, one moment’ and freezes on a spinning wheel, then I get a rather sinister-sounding email about my APT configuration being corrupt and advising me to switch to another mirror, but when I do this nothing happens.
In case it helps: the following License Information appears from the Help menu in my Calc document on the Raspberry:
Version: 7.4.7.2 / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 40(Build:2)
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 6.12; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-US (en_US.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Debian package version: 4:7.4.7-1+deb12u10
Calc: threaded
However, the following (different) appears in the same place when I’m on my laptop (Linux Mint) working with the .ods document on it.
Version: 24.2.7.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 420(Build:2)
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 6.8; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-GB (en_GB.UTF-8); UI: en-GB
Ubuntu package version: 4:24.2.7-0ubuntu0.24.04.4
Calc: threaded
Thanks again!
Paul.