Open Office Excel Equivalent

I tried importing an Excel spreadsheet into Open Office a few years ago and it refused to import the graph part, as I recall. It may be fixed by now, but you might want to test it on all your files before you "buy" it.

One assumes that you mean M$Office equivalent.

...and the current incarnation of OOo which is getting all the attention is called LibreOffice. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (prior owner of OOo). Oracle hates FOSS; the project forked and is more vigorous than ever.

The easy way to verify the goodness is to use the product to open the files that YOU use.

It's simple to test drive the software. (You don't have to install anything.) These distros contain the most recent version:

Don't want to download and burn it yourself? Got 6 bucks?

Again, that would depend on YOUR usage. The no-install test drive available via bootable Linux on removable media answers all questions.

I've used Open Office on the home computer. Development stopped a couple of years ago and the code was picked up then released by a new group as Libre Office

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I think the answer is to try it...

It is generally very good and very compatible, I use it exclusively. If you are a heavy or "power" user you may find some areas sufficiently different, or are lacking some obscure feature, that you decide not to use it.

The LibreOffice fork is the one to go for these days, it seems to be getting most of the new development effort.

More like libreoffice is a different branch/fork (when I looked at it due to it being what mint uses by default when I was fiddling with mint to see if I could make some old laptops useful for basic functions, it sure looked like "open office with mostly cosmetic/name changes to remove any reference to oracle." Oracle did retire from OO just this past spring (April 2011), and passed the project on to Apache.

It's (or they're) freeware. Slap it on and try your files on it - if you don't like it, take it off and try another. For what I do with spreadsheets, OO's peachy, and imports them without a hitch. YMMV.

The main thing OO doesn't have that some folks care about is Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I'm an amateur :-)

Thanks, John, I'll look into it. ...Jim Thompson

I don't know about Excel. I tried to use the drawing program. When exporting a picture it saves the whole page instead of cropping the image to the extends of the drawing.

Thanks for mentioning that, Phil. I was toying with the idea of trying it again, but I can't live without VBA.

John S

Yep, that is pretty much the main deifference I saw as well. For some of my clients that's a show-stopper.

IMO the main thing missing is Access. Are you sure it doesn't do VBA? I think it does have at least some VBA support AFAIK. I had a spreadsheet with some macro code in it which worked OK (except it found a latent divide by zero bug...).

I rather like the PDF export from the word processor. It gives all sorts of PDF options that 'cute PDF' does not have. You can call out what screen format you would like.

When I send out the Sunday Mass program to my church choir, was printing from OO to cutePDF and invariably, when opened it appeared at 200% enlargement. I know when this happens, to click the full page button but it seemed that other choir folks didn't know this (including a retired chairperson of a university math department... she kept complaining about having to scroll too much).

I use MS-Works for databases. It has size limits but I haven't ever come close. But that's certainly not for a big enterprise.

Nope, only "limited VBA support". So some macros will run but not everything:

Quote "OpenOffice.org can run many VBA macros unmodified due to its built-in; limited VBA support".

Macros often run but when you have to access hardware through it that supposedly gets dicey.

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Last time I had looked at Openoffice the formula support was not there. So if you use the advance math pack or what ever it was called in MS, forget it.

Cheers

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Did you solve the problem of Excel '97 use after SP2 in XP? It took me a while but it's a non issue now.

--- Posted via news://freenews.netfront.net/ - Complaints to snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net

=A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

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My advice: Stick with Excel '97. Best version ever.!!!

That said, if you want more rows, or just have to have the latest and greatest, you know you can keep '97 and still load the newer versions too! The only problem with that is if you double-click an *.xls, it will launch the later version and there's no way to adjust that (on Windows).

I prefer Excel -97 myself, as I have loads of VBA written for it that does not easily port to dot-net stuff, plus, I'm lazy. And, I'm set in my ways - I don't like the newer user interfaces. They got all fancy and stuff (for no good reason), and now I don't know where to find any of the toolbar button functions anymore. You can say the same for most Microsoft products that seem to go through this facelift process every few years. Skype too for that matter (as of late). Oh way, that's Microsoft now... :)

Any particular reason you want to ween off '97?

-mpm

What problem? I've used Excel 97 pn XP SP2 before and it just worked.

Yup! I'll second that. This goes for other software as well, such as MS-Works where 6.0 was IMHO the last good version although I have never tried 9.0.

OOO Calc is more compatible with Excel files than Excel. I use Calc to fix our accountants Excel files which break under M$ Excel (running the file thru Calc will clean up the mess Excel made). Calc has the same feel as Excel for the most part. Don't know about importing graphs, and such.