Calc

Calc is the spreadsheet component of OpenOffice.org.

Evaluating OOoCalc

I’ve had very little experience using spreadsheets. (The last time I seriously used one was around 10 years ago, and then I wasn’t doing anything very complicated.) But in the past two years I’ve needed to create and use several spreadsheets, so I’ve had an incentive to learn to use Calc.

Unlike my switch from Word to Writer, I don’t have years of experience with Microsoft Excel to unlearn, but almost all of the reference material (beyond the basics) I have available is written about Excel.

As usual for me, I didn’t have the leisure to learn the basics and then progress slowly into a study of the advanced functions and how to construct formulas. I had to plunge immediately into the deep end, as described on this page about analyzing survey results.

I’ll add more pages as I construct other spreadsheets and find more information.

Books and tutorials on OOo Calc

The Help supplied with OOo isn’t much help when you don’t know anything much about spreadsheets (or the formulas used in them), so I’ve been trying to find useful material.

The OOoAuthors team is working on a user guide for Calc. Ten chapters have been published. You can get them from the OOoAuthors website or from the OOo Documentation Project.

See also the many books on OOo listed on this page. More advanced users may be interested in Learn OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Macro Programming by Mark Bain, Packt Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1847190979. Also available, including a PDF version, from the publisher.

Tips for using OOo Calc

I highly recommend Solveig Haugland’s blog. Here are some examples of her work on Calc:

I also highly recommend Bruce Byfield’s blog. Here are some of his articles on Calc:

OpenOffice Calc Tips includes tips, templates and macros. It hasn’t been updated for over a year, but what’s there looks good. Scroll down and click on one of the entries under “Archives” or “Categories” on the right-hand side.