Open interval vs "fixed" interval for index/match or vlookup

Dear all,

I’d like to report a particular “buggy” behavior from LO Calc that I do not see on other spreadsheet programs, such MS Excel, WPS, Google sheets.

When we use a text funcion such a match/index or even vlookup with an “open interval” (e.g. B:B instead of $B$2:$B$129$), and I copy it to multiple lines, LO Calc seems to look through the “infinite” lines and therefore becoming unresponsive, and the calculation really takes very long to be completed.

In my daily basis I use the match/index function to make stock / sales / product information sheets to speak to each other, and this LO behavior is quite annoying as to achieve a good performance I have to fixate all the intervals, where I’m used to just inform the column label on other spreadsheets software.

I am using the attached spreadsheet as an example (this is a real example from my job).

I prepared two example columns, where we can copy the formula from D2 to D129 on the ledger tab, and this would just work with good performance (it calculates within a second).

If we do the same from B2 to B129, it will also calculate correctly, however it takes around a minute on my laptop, and the Operationa System thinks the software has crashed.

Am I missing something here, or this is something we could report as a bug / improvement to be done?

Thank you all for your time.

The best,

PS:
Version: 7.5.3.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 9f56dff12ba03b9acd7730a5a481eea045e468f3
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 6.2; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: pt-BR (pt_BR.UTF-8); UI: pt-BR
Flatpak
Calc: threaded

Index-Match example.ods (22.2 KB)

Maybe B:B means in the LO: more than one million of rows (but not “only the filled-in part of the full range” nor some similar)
Use exact range references instead of the undefined (not clearly defined) ones.

Dear Zizi64, thank you for your feedback!

That’s exactly what I’m currently doing, however I’d like to suggest this as an enhancement to the LO developers, as it is kind of standard on other software. I’m not sure whether the Ask.libreoffice.org is the correct channel though.

Use the bugreport/feature request site:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/
We are (mostly) users here - like you are.

It seems that the TRIM function in B2 is the time consuming part of the formula.

1 Like

LeroyG is right. Remove the TRIM function, the spaces from the stock list, refresh the pivot and everything works smoothly.

Dear all, thank you very much for all your feedback.

Indeed, by removing the trim function on columns B performance was great, as good as column D with the trim funcion*.

Anyway I’ll file it on bugs.documentfoundation.org/ to let developers know about it.

*I am using it as the original raw data to be searched has to be trimmed as it always is exported with the spaces.

Also, using regex can help in this case:
ledger.b2 =INDEX($Pivot_stock_1.B:B;MATCH(A2&" *";$Pivot_stock_1.A:A;0))
............................................-----

It is common well-formed practice to link back the resulting bug report here, so tdf#155551.