Great merged cells filling improvements in LibreOffice 7.1

Attila Szűcs, one from hungarian LibreOffice developers (he's from NISZ team) made great improvements for work with merged cells.

I'll show you pair of images for illustrate it (left - 7.0, right - 7.1):

 

Select three cells, merge it (as shown on left image) and then try drag-fill columns down. A result was strange and very unexpected. Now in 7.1 it works as users wanted last 8 year, look at right image. It works for filling in to any direction!

Go further:

If you want to have merged cells with some number sequences, then you got a result as on left image above (Merge A1 with A2 and A3 with A4, type 1 into first merged cells and 2 into second, select both and try fill cells down). But now in 7.1 all work as users could expect! Look at a right image above.

It's really great, right?

Filter by months and years in Calc pivot table

I have a huge spreadsheet with many data about work days and hours of special construction machinery with a date of work. There is a pivot table created from that data, where I can see number of hours for every object by type of the machinery. And I need to have a filter by month and years in the Calc pivot table.

But I got a problem when I wanted make a filter using normal pivot table control functionality. I moved Date field to Page fields area: 

and I had a filter by Date in Pivot table, but...

I can't select monts or years there, only days! I want have opportunity like in the Autofilter:

Can I get it in the Pivot table? Yes (nearly)! There are several methods for it.

First, I can add additional columns to the source table, one for month number with formula like =MONTHS(<link_to_cell_with_date>) and second for years with formula like =YEAR(<link_to_cell_with_date>). And I'll have the source table like this:

Then I should change a source in my Pivot table's properties dialog and drag Mounth and Year items to Page fields area. And I have next:

It works fine, I can select months (one or several) and years (one or several), but can I make it without any additional column in my source table? Yes, I can.

Second method is creating of filters by months and years using Pivot table's parameters and grouping.

Open the Pivot table's properties dialog and drag Date item from Page field area to Row fields area. Note, the Pivot table became very unusable, but that action was need us only for some magic. Then select any cell with date in Pivot table and press F12 key (or use menu Data->Group and Outline->Group). It will open a Grouping dialog:

Check Months and Years items there and press OK button. The Pivot table became less unusable ;-) Then need to open Pivot table's properties dialog and drag Date and Years items from Row fields area to Page fields area and close the dialog. Now I have my filters with months and years:

I see some problems in the appearance of filters in second method. 

I can't change name Date to Months! Interesting than I can change filed name in MS Excel in that case. MS Excel allows to set a custom name for the field. 

And both filters have some boundary values like <11/01/2017 and >04/05/2019. I don't know why does it need, but they are.

The second method looks very strange and not obvious. In general that actions is a full copy from MS Excel and I don't like a process, but I need a result of that magic.

The same Russian post is here.

The best LibreOffice Extensions. Remove Duplicates Fast

There are many good extensions for LibreOffice. You can find it all on site https://extensions.libreoffice.org/. I want to tell you about the best from it.

So, there is an enhancement 85976 about adding of Remove Duplicates feature to LibreOffice Calc. That is really useful function and LibreOffice Calc isn't having it now.

However, there is Remove Duplicates Fast extension that adds need feature to Calc. It's a fork of another extension Remove Duplicates.

RDF allows you delete all row duplicates from selected range using values from one or more column. Just download it by link above, install and use it from Data menu.

Thanks to Mike Kaganski for great code writing.