Episode: 1645
Title: HPR1645: 42 - LibreOffice Calc - Data Manipulation 2: Standard and Advanced Filters
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1645/hpr1645.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:16:13

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Hello, this is Ahuka welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio
and another exciting episode in our ongoing series on Libra Office Calt and continuing with data manipulation.
Last time we looked at sorting an auto filter and now I want to look at the other types of
ways you can filter stuff, standard and advanced filters.
Standard filter is something you can set from within the auto filter drop down or you can go there
through the data menu by selecting data then filter and then standard filter.
Now let's look at the question we ended the last tutorial with how many females over the age 40
had a case in 1978. We saw that we could get this by manually putting check marks in every age
that was greater than 40 using auto filter but how do we do this using standard filter?
Well if you had already filtered for 1978 and for female using auto filter you could go to the drop down
for any of the columns and select standard filter and this would bring up a window
and in the window you would see that the first that had filter criteria and the first row would say
the field name year condition is equal it's an equal sign value 78 and then the second row
has something we added and it is called an operator and the operator in this case is AND.
Field name sex condition equals value female.
So as just repeating what we've already done using auto filter the standard filter sees what you've
already applied. Now operator is important you can also select OR as an operator this is one of
those things you cannot do using auto filter. Auto filter everything is an AND.
If we selected OR as an operator here it would mean that we would select any case that occurred
in 1978 or any case that occurred involving a female. So we could have cases that involve
females that occurred in other years or we could have cases in 1978 that involved males.
The general rule to remember is that using AND reduces the size of your results and using OR
increases the size. So to get the answer we are looking for we need to add one more filter here.
So on line 3 select AND as the operator age as the field name greater than as the condition
and 40 as the value. Though there is a drop down for value you were better off just typing in 40
here the drop down just shows every value already existing in the age field and you may not have
the exact number you want in there. When you're done click OK and you will see the six cases we
noted previously. Another great advantage of using the standard filter is the increased flexibility
of the condition criterion. Using auto filter every filter is implicitly set to equal as the
condition. But the standard filter gives you a ton of options you can have equal less than greater
than less than or equal to greater than or equal to largest smallest those are interesting.
Largest is like the top 10 we saw in auto filter but you can specify a number other than 10 such as
the five largest values in the field and the opposite smallest is also available for when you need
to go in the other direction. Then there is largest percentage and smallest percentage. So you could
get the top 1% by using largest percentage with a value of 1 or a you know the bottom 5% whatever
the case may be. Then there are a number of things that are essentially string operations
contains does not contain. All right well so how does things like that work? For the field name select
sex the condition is contains and type in value EM. So it's going to look for any string that has
the letters EM somewhere in that string. Now in this case that's equivalent to selecting female.
So we could have just said equals female. Now does not contain goes the other direction. So if we took
the field name of race and the condition is does not contain and we type in the letters BL well
that would have the effect of filtering out everyone in the data set who is black. So
then there's begins with. So for the field name sex an example is condition is begins with
and type in value EM well that obviously that'd be equivalent to selecting equals male.
For the field name sex use the condition does not begin with and type in the value F and this
would also be equivalent to selecting equals male. And finally you've got ends with and does not end
with. If you understood the begins with you can figure out ends with. Now you can combine filters
in other ways. For instance suppose you wanted to select everyone in data set who is 21 years of
age or older but not older than 65. You would do this with two filters using the standard filter.
For the first one field name is age condition is greater than or equal to and type in a value of
21. Then for the second filter with a and we would say field name is age condition is less than
or equal and type in 65. Click OK and you have your answer. Now you can do the opposite type of
filter using the OR operator. To get everyone who is either younger than 21 or older than 65 make
the first filter age less than 21 for the second filter put in operator of OR field age condition
greater than value 65. This should give you the group that was excluded from the previous filtering.
And there is more. If you look at the lower left of the standard filter window you see more options.
Clicking this opens a bottom section to the window. Here you can make selections like case sensitive.
That can be useful if you need to distinguish strings which might have lower case and upper case
and you need to select on that basis. Range contains column labels. This should be checked by default.
Usually the first row contains the labels for each field and you would want them mixed up in the
filtering. Regular expression. This allows you to use regular expressions in any filter which is
said to either equal or not equal. In particular this is how you would use wild cards in your filter.
In the show notes I've put a link to a page that explains the regular expressions that are
supported in Calc. Now if you're a regular expression kind of person you probably realize that
every programming environment in existence has their own idea of what constitutes a regular
expression and how it works. So it's worth taking a look to see what Calc does and not just
charge in there saying oh I know regular expressions I don't need to read the manual.
Another thing in the more options. No duplication. Now this is duplication across an entire row.
So if you have two rows that are completely identical only one of them gets picked.
Finally copy results to. A very interesting option. This lets you apply a filter
then copy the resulting data to a new location. For example create a new sheet and give it a name
such as copied results from filter then set up a filter. In my sample spreadsheet I took the
filter that selected people under 21 or over 65. I clicked copy results to and then clicked on the
roll up icon on the far right of that row. I went to my new sheet clicked on cell A1 of that sheet
then clicked the roll down icon to return to my window and clicked okay all the results
could copy to the new sheet. One interesting change is that everything is renumbered. So what you
lose are the row numbers that you had in the original. The case numbers still stay there because
that's part of the data. Now with all of that with standard filter there's also something called
advanced filters. It's a very odd naming because in fact the advanced filters to my mind at least
seem a little simpler than the standard filters. So the idea is to do everything in the spreadsheet
you enter your criteria in cells of the spreadsheet. So I created a new sheet to do a filter using
the AND operator and copied it from the reduced data set sheet. Advanced filtering always assumes
you are operating on the data in the current page. So I moved over to columns I through N
selected the six cells on row one for those columns then clicked merge and center then I typed in
AND filter made it bold 12 point added a blue background you know just creating my header one of
those things I like to do. Under that on row two I copied my six column headers from my data set.
Then in row three I can just put in the criteria I'm looking for. If I'm using equals I can just
enter the value equals is assumed in other words but if I want to do anything using inequalities I
need to type that in. So in this row I type 78 under the year field greater than 40 in the age field
and male in the sex field. Once I have done this I can go to data menu to filter to advanced filter
and that's going to bring up my window and so first I'm going to highlight the range of cells that
contains the data. For my set it to cells A1 through F582 then go to data filter advanced filter
select the range of cells that have the column labels in the criteria which for my example is cells
I2 through N3. I click the roll up icon to the right of the range field then click and drag to
select this range then click the roll down icon and click OK and I get the result.
What this will do is hide every row that does not meet these criteria. In my example that
results in seven rows or seven cases selected. Now when doing an AND filter putting the criteria
on the same row will produce the results you want to get an OR filter put them on different lines
to replicate the one I did previously I set up a sheet with the data created a filter section
like I did above but in this case I entered less than 21 in cell L3.
L is the column for age in my filter criteria and greater than 65 in cell L4.
This will select everyone in the data set who is under 21 or over 65.
Execute the filter like the above example and in the one that I did I resulted in
395 cases being selected. Now you can do many of the same things using these two methods.
To me advanced is a bad name. The standard filter to my mind is more flexible and easy to work with.
The one advantage to advance that I can see is that you can have all the filter criteria
readily visible on the same sheet as the data and I can see that that is handy.
Still if I only had time to master one approach I would master standard filters.
Now I have once again created a sample spreadsheet that has the examples that I created
with this sample data set and the link to that is in the show notes. I invite you to download
and use it to your Hertz content and that means that this is a hookah signing off for Hacker
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