Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 103976
Autofilter and Standard Filter not intuitive
Last modified: 2014-05-22 06:26:35 UTC
I have started to use OpenOffice as my primary Office Suite and I'm using Calc a lot... While using the AutoFilter function (Data -> Filter -> Autofiler) I discovered a few bugs, which I think are related. Scenario: (see attachment) If you create a sheet1 with only column headers - e.g. HEADER1...HEADER3 and active Autofiler - no problems. Issue/Bug: If you then create a sheet2 with a sheet header, e.g. 'My Budget' and then in row 2 adds HEADER1...HEADER3 as above and the turn on AutoFilter. Problems! First of all, the AutoFilter dialogs on sheet1 are turned off and on sheet2 your are able to choose a specific value to filter, but you can't really use the 'Standard Filter' function, as the headers no longer are recognized, the Standard Filter dialog shows only the ColumnA...X as field names not the column header titles. Workaround: I found, that if I add a empty Row between the sheet header, 'My Budget' and the first column header e.g. in row 3, no issues. ???
Created attachment 63937 [details] Examples on problems with Standard Filter and Autofilter
I checked with "Ooo 3.1.0 WIN XP multilingual version German UI activated [OOO310m11 (Build 9399)]" and can confirm some of the reported effects, although I have problems to understand all details of the reported problems. I believe a strong recommendation in Help that a data range with column labels should be defined for Auto Filter use would help to avoid mrmaceurope's problems. Of course an automatic column labels detection will have limitations, but may be that feature can be improved? I believe this one is a DUP of Issue 12666 @mrmaceurope: Currently It seems that the report summary is "Doing things wrong does not work ;-) For your "First of all ..." problem we already have Issue 12666 (you know, you left a comment there ...) And in Issue 12666 you also find the hint that defining data ranges makes auto filter much more comfortable.
Correct, if I define a Data Range and then select it and try to use the Standard Filter... it works correctly. However, to me, it's a bug - If Autofilter headers can't be detected correct as I describe, users will think that the filter function isn't working when they are trying to use the Standard Filter function.
In sheet ERROR of attachment replace: "The range does not contain column headers. Do you want the first line to be used as column header?" with: "Please select column headers" + Select button Let user highlight the column headers.
I can't imagine what the concrete enhancement request might be here.