Open Office

  • Thread starter Thread starter rob nobel
  • Start date Start date
R

rob nobel

Can anyone advise how they've found Open Office and whether it is worth
using, particularly for Excel applications?
Rob
 
rob nobel said:
Can anyone advise how they've found Open Office and whether it is worth
using, particularly for Excel applications?
Click to expand...

Depends on what you're trying to do. OO Calc's array handling is much weaker
than Excel's, so many (possibly most) of the trickier array formulas given
in these Excel ngs won't work in OO Calc. But most of the other techniques
work.

OO Calc provides only 32,000 rows per worksheet, and it lacks a few
functions Excel provides (CELL for one). Its help facility is weak compared
to Excel, 123 and Quattro Pro.

There are a few things OO Calc has that Excel lacks. The BASE function does
one heck of a lot more than the toy DEC2* and *2DEC functions. The FORMULA
and ISFORMULA functions provide access to cell formula contents and whether
a cell contains a formula - perhaps not frequently asked about, but reliably
generating a few questions a month in these newsgroups.

OO Calc provides 3D worksheet addressing (but neither 3D INDEX nor OFFSET),
so if worksheets were in the order A, B, C and D, and cell F5 in worksheet B
referred to cell G3 of worksheet A (syntax: =A.G3), then copying cell F5 in
worksheet B and pasting into cell H4 of worksheet C would give a reference
to cell I2 in worksheet B (i.e., =B.I2). INDIRECT can return 3D references,
which are not ranges, so =SUM(INDIRECT("A.A1:D.F8")) is effectively the same
as =SUM(A.A1:D.F8), but =COUNTIF(INDIRECT("A.A1:D.F8");">1") returns a
reference error.

OO Calc also provides external reference links via its DDE function rather
than Excel's DDE-like hardcoded expressions. This makes OO Calc a just bit
more flexible. OO Calc also provides regular expression support in Find &
Replace and its SEARCH function.

One EXTREMELY nice feature is that OO Calc ALWAYS displays its Text Import
dialog when opening any text file, including CSV files.

OO Calc fits somewhere between Works Spreadsheet and Excel, closer to Excel
but with some annoying deficiencies. If you believe in the 80/20 rule - 80%
of users take advantage of 20% of features - OO Calc is more than adequate
most of the time.
 
Well, that's certainly more than I expected. Thanks for all that info
Harlan.
I gather from your comments that it might be better to stay with Excel and
use it sparingly if there are other functions that may be of use.
Rob
 
Back
Top