Quickly fill blank cells in a list in LibreOffice Calc

Solution 1:

Upgrade to LibreOffice 4:

Then you'll find under the Edit menu, a Fill sub-menu, and under that, an item called Down; this gives the contents of the first cell selected to all the other cells.

Solution 2:

What you can do is the following:

Select an empty adjacent column, let's say B (insert a new column if you have data in B already)
In the B1 enter =IF(A1,A1,<your formula or constant>)
With B1 still selected press Ctrl+Shift+End then Ctrl+D to copy this formula for the rest of the column

The column B should have the data you were looking for

Solution 3:

In LibreOffice 4.0 you can do a search and replace:

select the area in which you want to fill empty cells
Edit > Search & Replace
search for nothing but check “[x] Entire cells“ and if you have done step 1 (selection) check also in “More options” “[x] current selection only”
insert into the field of replace the text you want to replace

This may also work in previous versions of LibreOffice.

Solution 4:

This is a lot more difficult in LO than in Excel! Even using Find Replace with Regular Expressions with ^$ doesn't work.... There is a solution, but it's not elegant.

Select the whole area (cells with content and blank cells, ex : A1:A50)
Ctrl+C
Select the area from 1st blank cell till the end, ex : A3:A50
Press F2, then write =A2 (or A49) 'cell above cell with focus
Alt+Enter
Select again the whole area
Ctrl+Shift+V
Check 'text', 'number', may be 'format' (what you want to copy) and 'skip empty cells'.

Found this at: OpenOffive Forum

Solution 5:

Select an empty adjacent column, let's say B. (insert a new column if you have data in B already)
In the B1 enter: =IF($A2="";$B1;$A2)
With B1 still selected press Ctrl+Shift+End then Ctrl+D to copy this formula for the rest of the column.