This beginner’s tutorial will explain how to perform autosum in the Calc program in LibreOffice, and OpenOffice.
When working with large spreadsheets containing a considerable number of rows or columns with data, it is often needed autosum with a quick click of a menu or button instead of manually typing the SUM function. LibreOffice, OpenOffice spreadsheet program Calc have this feature and here’s how you can do it.
Table of Contents
Autosum in Calc
1. Open any Calc workbook with numbers and data, or open your workbook.
2. Select the cell where you would like to put the autosum of your data.
3. Click on the sigma icon beside the formula bar and click Sum from the dropdown menu.
4. You can see the Sum is calculated automatically.
Tips
- If you select multiple columns with numbers, autosum detects all the data and gives you a quick sum.
- If your data have text column labels, autosum ignores the same and gives you the correct autosum.
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How to make autosum work in macro?
Doesn’t work
Correction. I had to open another Calc window and move my data there to get the summing to work. Hopefully just a fluke. All is working now.
It should work. What error you are receiving?
error 509, I get
ok, I think I fixed this – my locale and the file I was using had different decimal – [,] instead of [.] so it wasn’t recognising it as numbers….
This works only if the cell displaying the sum is immediately adjacent to the column or row of cells you want to sum, and it includes only contiguous cells in the column or row (that is, it stops when it encounters a blank cell after at least one cell with data) . Perhaps this is obvious, but Step 2 here doesn’t say that. In other words, you can’t use AutoSum to produce a number in, say, a summary section at the top of a sheet.
LibreOffice Calc doesn’t support an autosum at the top of a table, yet. The Autosum always calculates at the bottom of your dataset.
When I try to Autosum a column I get a random date in the cell where the sum total should be
Probably that cell is having a different format. Tty changing the format to Number where you are putting the auto sum value.
https://www.libreofficehelp.com/format-cells-libreoffice-calc/
Good evening Arindam,
Thank you for such a useful tutorial series on Calc.
Is there some link or place to download the sheet you are
using in this chapter?
I would like to replicate the exercices.
Regards,
Not yet. The sample sheets are planned for coming days for each tutorial as download. Stay tuned.
I’m doing all the steps, but the result is always 0 🙁
I am using the auto sum at the bottom of the data set, but the cell just shows the formula and not the result. How do I get it to show the result please.
Change the formatting of the cell to General. Right click > Format Cells > Format=General