Short term: I’m trying to automate transcribing a list from:
A
123
234
B
456
567
789
C
345
Into an array/table
123, A
234, A
456, B
567, B
789, B
345, C
Long term answer I’m looking for: where’s a lemmy community I can ask questions like this (like about using formulas in Librecalc/Onlyoffice suite/maybe VBA with them too) in the future?
Or, if not yet established on lemmy, recommended librecalc/Onlyoffice forums?
Thank you for your time.
Have you tried asking a LLM? I find them useful for queries like this.
Thanks for checking. I asked ChatGPT3.5 to make a solution with excel since I have limited access to it at work. CG came up with making my data a table with Power Query & using a Fill tool, but Fill>Down isn’t doing what CG is saying it’s supposed to do.
I hope I could do this at home though because I only have Onlyoffice & Libreoffice, & excel in the browser is so limited.
You can most likely use Excel formulas but I’m also not a spreadsheet guy.
A spreadsheet is always going to be a bad fit for a problem like this. You want something like the command line tools sed and awk (maybe combined with some simple regex) to parse a stream of input like this. These tools were literally built to solve this kind of problem. If you are stuck in windows, the Windows Subsystem for Linux will have these tools.
I don’t think that formula is the right tool to do this. You need to write a macro.
Try asking at !libreoffice@lemmy.ml
How can you distinguish the the alpha cells from the numeric cells?
If you can fit that distinction in an “if” condition I would start by making an adjacent column along the lines of “if left cell is alpha then left cell else above cell”. Then you’ll have what you need except you’ll have some rows of AA BB etc. You could then either delete those rows (but only after copying and pasting values — not formulas) or better yet make a pivot table.
I usually divide a cell’s value by 1. A value that isn’t numeric will throw an error. Combining that with ISERROR or IFERROR, you can do some pretty powerful stuff.
Yeah, there are plenty of ways of doing that, but I was assuming OP’s sheet had other types of cells and that the A’s and 123s were a minimal working example.
