Working with lots of data in LibreOffice

I have 150000 observations, which I am trying to work with in LibreOffice (new name for OpenOffice.org). The main thing I want to do is to have some formula calculated for all of these observations. Different parameters of the observations are in the first 4 columns, so I wrote a function in the following column in row 2 that uses the previous columns. Now I need to copy the formula all the way down to row 150000. I tried using the mouse (as usual), but this is just way to slow. Is there a faster way to mark everything all the way to the bottom?

Solution 1:

Yes - you can define the range of selected cells manually, and after that, "fill" the formula into all selected cells. This may take some time if the formula is applied to 150,000 data sets, so maybe you should proceed stepwise (applying for rows 1 to 50,000, 51.000 to 100,000 and so on - or use a database as proposed by m0skit0).

The cell that's currently selected is displayed in the "Name Box":

You can modify the selection by simply clicking into the "Name Box" and change its value:

After you've set the selection's range this way, you can copy the the formula from cell B1 down into all selected cells using Fill -> Down from Edit menu:

or using the shortcut CTRL+D: this operation will only affect the selected cells; in my example: B1:B3.

As result, the formula is pasted only inside the cell range defined in the "Name Box".

Solution 2:

Try double-clicking on the bottom right hand corner of the cell (ie on the box that you would otherwise drag).

Copied verbatim from this stackoverflow answer.