Find options quickly in new search bar

Libreoffice 24.2, released at the end of January, added a search bar to the Options menu, making it easier to find the option you want. Click Tools at the top of any Libreoffice program followed by Options – or press the keyboard shortcut Alt+f12. Now type your request into the bar at the top and Libreoffice will try to recognise what you’re looking for and find it for you.

Usefully, the new tool can find options that are inside the menus you open by clicking the plus (+) sign. In our example (pictured below), we typed ‘print’ 1 , and it found the correct option 2.

Version 8.0 of Onlyoffice, released in January, added the Goal Seek tool (already in Microsoft Excel and Libreoffice Calc), which reveals what the value of a cell needs to be to meet a specific criteria. Here, we’ll use it to calculate what interest rate you’d need on a loan for your repayments to be £500 a month.

Add the headings in cells A1-A4 ( 1 in our screenshot), then in B1-B2 fill in the loan amount and number of monthly payments you want to make

2 . Leave the interest rate blank, then in B4 type =PMT(B3/12,B2,B1) 3 and press Enter. It will assume a zero interest rate for now, and return a payment rate based on this in B4.

Click the Data tab, then Goal Seek. In the ‘Set cell’ box, type the name of the cell containing the formula (B4). In the ‘To value’ box, type the result you want (in our case, -500 for £500). The minus sign means it’s a payment. In ‘By changing cell’, type the name of the cell that contains the value you want to adjust – for us, that’s B3 (interest rate).

Click OK twice. Now convert the interest rate into a percentage by clicking the cell (B3) then the Home tab followed by Percentage in the General dropdown menu. That gives us an interest rate of 17.27 per cent 4.