openoffice.org - Open Office Spreadsheet (Calc) - Concatenate text cells with delimiters

Question

I am using Open Office's spreadsheet program and am trying to concatenate several text cells together with delimeters. For example, suppose I have the cells below:

+--------+
| cell 1 |
+--------+
| cell 2 |
+--------+
| cell 3 |
+--------+
| cell 4 |
+--------+
| cell 5 |
+--------+

I would like to concatenate them with delimiters so that the result is in one cell like this one:

+----------------------------------------------+
| (cell 1),(cell 2),(cell 3),(cell 4),(cell 5) |
+----------------------------------------------+

My first thought was to try and make a macro or something, but I don't think open office supports those. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Thanks a lot Markus for finding a solution to this.

Here are some slightly more detailed instructions for the benefit of OpenOffice Basic newbies like myself. This applies to version 3.1:

Tools -> Macros -> Organize Macros -> OpenOffice.org Basic...

Now select from the explorer tree where you want your function live, e.g. it can be in your own macro library (My Macros / Standard) or stored directly in the current spreadsheet.

Now enter a new Macro name and click New to open the OO.org Basic IDE. You'll see a REM statement and some stub Sub definitions. Delete all that and replace it with:

Function STRJOIN(range, Optional delimiter As String, Optional before As String, Optional after As String)
    Dim row, col As Integer
    Dim result, cell As String

    result = ""

    If IsMissing(delimiter) Then
        delimiter = ","
    End If
    If IsMissing(before) Then
        before = ""
    End If
    If IsMissing(after) Then
        after = ""
    End If

    If NOT IsMissing(range) Then
        If NOT IsArray(range) Then
            result = before & range & after
        Else
            For row = LBound(range, 1) To UBound(range, 1)
                For col = LBound(range, 2) To UBound(range, 2)
                    cell = range(row, col)
                    If cell <> 0 AND Len(Trim(cell)) <> 0 Then
                        If result <> "" Then
                            result = result & delimiter
                        End If
                        result = result & before & range(row, col) & after
                    End If
                Next
            Next
        End If
    End If

    STRJOIN = result
End Function

The above code has some slight improvements from Markus' original:

• Doesn't start with a delimiter when the first cell in the range is empty.

• Allows optional choice of the delimiter (defaults to ","), and the strings which go before and after each non-blank entry in the range (default to "").

• I renamed it STRJOIN since "join" is the typical name of this function in several popular languages, such as Perl, Python, and Ruby.

• Variables all lowercase

Now save the macro, go to the cell where you want the join to appear, and type:

  =STRJOIN(C3:C50)

replacing C3:C50 with the range of strings you want to join.

To customise the delimiter, instead use something like:

  =STRJOIN(C3:C50; " / ")

If you wanted to join a bunch of email addresses, you could use:

  =STRJOIN(C3:C50; ", "; "<"; ">")

and the result would be something like

<foo@bar.com>, <baz@qux.org>, <another@email.address>, <and@so.on>