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I'd like to refer to an entire column, like you can in Excel by using A:A. I found a discussion on the openoffice.org forums which is a few years old, and suggests there is/was no neat way to do it. The options presented are

  1. Use A1:A65536.
  2. Use OFFSET($A$1;0;0;65536;1) as the previous range may get altered if you insert or remove rows.
  3. Use Data -> Define Range... to name the column range (but which for me still just equates to $A$1:$A$1048576).

These approaches seem over-complicated and still don't achieve my goal perfectly. Does anyone know of a way?

Thanks,

Andy

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1  
What is your goal and how doesn't (3) achieve it perfectly? Do you know that Excel's A:A isn't just syntactic sugar for A1:Amax and that the internal representation is different? – msw Jul 6 '10 at 10:05
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There's no single goal here; there's numerous situations I find where I'd like to reference a column. The way that (3) isn't perfect functionally is that it suffers from the same problem as (1): the range changes as rows are deleted. What I want is a quick way to refer to (necessarily) an entire column. Hope that clarifies. Cheers. – Andy Jul 6 '10 at 10:35
@Andy: thanks for the clarification. Unless you are using over a million rows, isn't this kinda only of academic concern? – msw Jul 6 '10 at 13:52
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I'm looking for a quick way. None of these approaches are as quick and simple as I'd like. If on top of that they don't even achieve what you want perfectly, you might post a question on superuser asking for a better way;) It's hard to imagine a situation where 3 would cause problems, but I don't want to rely on my imagination! I'd prefer something that's just semantically sound - I want a whole column. I do appreciate your time, but so far you're not actually helping make progress, but rather challenging the validity of the question. It's a simple Q, deserves a simple A (perhaps 'no!'). – Andy Jul 6 '10 at 15:05
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I agree with you entirely. I just merely wanted to know if it was possible with Calc, and open the question up to a wide audience! I'm not working on a project and at an impasse or anything. – Andy Jul 7 '10 at 8:35
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

You can make it less complicated by naming the column. Select the column and name it via the Name Box near the upper, left corner of calc. You can't use A:A but AA will work. This is similar to #3 above. It seems to handle insert/delete of rows fine but I didn't test it all that much. Make a template with every column named and start there when you need the feature. That seems to be the approach requiring the least effort.

However, this still doesn't work like I would expect. It's the same as using $A:$A in excel. If you copy the formula to a new column, it will continue to reference column A instead of being translated to a new column by the offset of the copy. Makes things really cumbersome if you're used to this feature.

In the end, to duplicate the functionality precisely, looks like we have to use A$1:A$1048576.

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up vote 1 down vote

Go to some cell (let's say, B1) and insert the value "A1048576" on it.

Then, to reference all values from the A column, simply enter something like

=max(a1:index(b1))

and doesn't matter if you delete some rows from the range, the b1 content always assure that you are referencing the last cell from the A column.

note: in my Calc the formula would be =máximo(a1:índice(b1)), so I'm not sure that in English the function name is really index.

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