Re: [libreoffice-users] First occurrence of a negative number in a column

At 22:57 22/01/2013 +0100, Kolbjørn Stuestøl wrote:
> Is there any way to find the first occurrence of 
> a number less (or greater) than a given number 
> in an unsorted array or a column?
> Example: A1:A31 contains a list of temperatures 
> a given month. I would like to find the first 
> day the temperature is below 0 degrees (metric).

What happens if there is no day in the month when 
the temperature was negative?  Let's say you want 
the value zero for the resulting day number in this case.

This is a little messy, but it works:

o In B1, enter =A1<0 and fill it down the column 
to B31.  This generates TRUE for your negative values and FALSE otherwise.

o In your result cell, enter 
=N(MATCH(TRUE;B1:B31;0)) .  The MATCH() function 
searches for the first TRUE value in the column B 
values and returns the relative position in the 
array of the first match.  (Note that this is not 
necessarily the row number, though will be in 
your example.)  This would return the #N/A error 
if there is no negative temperature; the N() 
function makes no change to real dates but converts this error to zero.

You may choose to hide column B, of course - or 
you could put its values away somewhere else on 
the sheet or even on a different sheet.

Incidentally, you are unlikely to get 
temperatures "below 0 degrees (metric)", as the 
SI temperature scale is kelvin, and its zero is 
the absolute zero of temperature!  But yes: I 
appreciate that you mean the celsius scale.  ;^)

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker



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