Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Welcome beginner. Please answer all of the questions below which may provide information necessary to answer your question.
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Which version of OpenOffice.org are you using? 2.3.1
What Operating System (version) are you using? XP home Sp2
What is your question or comment?

Is it possible to set up automatic consecutive numbering in calc? e.g. Invoices. I've searched the forum with no results!

Hi Martin,

You can set up Calc so that when a new sheet is copied/inserted it will copy a formula from a relative cell, which can result in consecutive numbering.

E.g in Sheet3 Cell E1 enter =SUM(Sheet2.E1+1) then copy/insert the sheet. The new sheet will be called Sheet3_2 by default. The formula in Cell E1 of that sheet will automatically be =SUM(Sheet3.E1+1).

However, if you need automatic consecutive numbering in an existing field I think you would need to link to, or create, a database for that purpose. I'm sure someone else will correct me if I'm wrong

HTH,

I can manage without it but looks like I'll need to learn base!

Thanks for your help

Martin.Flynn wrote:I can manage without it but looks like I'll need to learn base!

Thanks for your help

Yes, shure. As soon as you need some concept of uniqueness, you are lost with a spreadsheet. There is not much to learn about Base. The steepest learning curve is the overall concept of relational databases, relations, normalization and Structured Query Language (SQL). Many small companies earn their living with this kind of stuff. All software tools for running the IT of a company are based on databases and they are expensive.
Since you don't know about spreadsheets nor databases, you are far better off learning about databases first. Then you may decide in favour of any other database but Base or Base as just another tool to access your database. Spreadsheets *seem* to be easier but they become extremely comlpex when you try to build something reliable that looks like a database.

btw: =ROW() without arguments gives the unique number of this row. But you must not sort the list nor insert rows then.