OT: Open Office Calc

Use LibreOffice -- it started out from OpenOffice when Oracle took over, and tends to be more, well, open.

It won't execute Excel macros, but aside from that it interoperates fairly well with Excel.

Formulas are close but not exactly Excel. There are some issues going back and forth.

Cheers

As has been said already, forget Open Office - use Libre Office.

For my usage, LibreOffice has a number of advantages over MS Office, in no particular order:

1. It's free - no need for licensing.

1. It's cross-platform.

2. It doesn't invade your system, overwriting important parts of Windows with it's own versions. It does not do automatic updates that can leave your system in a continuous reboot hell (I've seen that with MS Office).

1. It doesn't run MS Office viruses. It can run some MS macros, but only when you want it to.

2. It looks like a serious program, with toolbars that leave plenty of space for your documents - it does not have a kid's colouring book of a ribbon bar wasting much of your screen.

1. It saves files in ISO standard formats, including ooxml (MS Office generates non-standard ooxml files, despite the standard being written by MS).

2. It does not corrupt your files just because they are getting a bit big.

1. It does not store your deleted data along with the real data.

2. It generates high-quality pdf files at the click of a button. If you have used styles, contents, and cross-references correctly in Writer, then these all turn out correctly in the pdf - something that you can only get with Word if you pay for Acrobat Writer and do a lot of manual work.

1. It encourages the use of styles, rather than encouraging manual editing of fonts, sizes, etc. This leads to better consistency in documents (though you can make a mess of it in Libreoffice too, and it is possible to do it correctly in MS Office).

2. LibreOffice comes in a range of languages, and lets you change it on the fly. It comes with a wide range of dictionaries.

For particular Calc vs. Excel differences, I would note:

• When drawing graphs, if you have missing or invalid data, Calc skips those points. Excel joins up the missing data, or replaces them with zeros.

- Excel is much faster than Calc for huge spreadsheets. There is seldom much difference for normal spreadsheets.

• Calc uses the same English names for all its formulas, while Excel uses local language versions and thus confuses everybody.

My office copy of MS Office lives on my bookshelf - I have not installed it. I haven't felt the need to install MS Office programs since Word for Windows 2.0 on Win3.1.

It has small differences, none are show stoppers that I have found. Rather than focusing on how it is different from Excel, I just use it and focus on how to use it best.

Yes, I use LibreOffice.

I'm at end-of-life myself, so I'm divorcing myself from Micro$hit... turned off updates, uninstalling anything Micro$hit >:-} ...Jim Thompson

Show stopper for me is that it wont run VB style macros. Having used these a lot in Excel, translating over to OO or Libre Office is not really an option.

OO is a bit slower on very large sheets, but a faster processor pretty much fixes that.

For just plain spreadsheet operation, OO is at least as good or better. Certainly its simpler and less intrusive than the current M$soft Office stuff.

I couldn't find any way to uninstall Libre Office.

sudo apt-get uninstall libreoffice

Works for me :D

I never liked Microsoft and as soon as Fedora was a bit usable I switched to that.

joe

Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

? No macros?

Meaning....converting over to Linux and the attendant steep learning curve?

It won't run vbscript or embed msword docs.

I don't believe I have ever felt the need to try, so I have no experience of trying (on Windows or Linux). LibreOffice is not like MS Office - it does not dig itself into your system like something out of "Alien". You can have multiple versions installed without harm, and just deleting the program directory would remove it except for the registry parts.

But since it turns up in the Control Panel "Programs and Features", or "Add/Remove Programs" (depending on your Windows version), then I think uninstalling it will be no harder than finding it on that list, and clicking unininstall.

I haven't tried it myself, but I gather you can run some VBA macros with LibreOffice. It might require a little bit of effort, and it won't support everything, but it could be possible to convert enough to be of use. (LibreOffice is far ahead of OpenOffice in this sort of thing.)

And for new macros, LibreOffice supports a number of ways of writing macros, including Python. MS Office support for LibreOffice macros is, of course, non-existent.

Many years ago there was a steep curve, not today. If you know 3 things you can use linux out of the box without learning anything else.

1. When looking at an extra HDDs it'll ask you for a password.
2. Get your apps from the repository whenever possible, not random online sites.
3. There is still some hardware that just won't run on linux, but most is fine.

NT

I can find it in "Programs", but there is no uninstall. It's OK, I just got new computers.

It's there on mine. Are you looking in the add/remove programs screen (in control panel)? Click on the program and the Uninstall button appears.