Calc
Calc is the spreadsheet component of OpenOffice.org.
Books and tutorials on OOo Calc
The OOoAuthors team has published on a user guide for Calc 3. You can get free PDFs of the book and its individual chapters from the OOo Documentation Project, or a printed copy from Lulu.com.
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.
Evaluating OOoCalc
I’ve had very little experience using spreadsheets. (The last time I seriously used one was around 15 years ago, and then I wasn’t doing anything very complicated.) But in the past few 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.
Tips for using OOo Calc
I highly recommend Solveig Haugland’s blog. Here are some examples of her work on Calc. Many more recent tips are available by searching her blog for Calc.
- Useful Calc Formulas and Related Tricks (19 Jul 07)
- Dropdown Lists in Calc (16 Jul 07)
- Using the Navigator to get around in an OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet (11 Jun 07)
- Edit > Paste Special, Transpose (09 Feb 07)
- Conditional Formatting in Calc Spreadsheets (31 Jan 07)
- Calc Project: Child Support Calculation Worksheet (Or Anything Else With Lots of Totals and Variables) (29 Jan 07)
- Weird Calculation and Sorting Problems in Calc Spreadsheets and Writer Tables (19 Jan 07)
- Number Formats in Writer Tables and Calc Spreadsheets (18 Jan 07)
- Interesting New Calc Logic in OOo 2.1 (15 Jan 07)
- Getting an HTML Table Into a Spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc (10 Dec 06)
- More on the Data Pilot: Analyzing a Data Source/Database (06 Nov 06)
- Data Pilots (Pivot Tables) in OOo Calc (01 Nov 06)
- Using the Detective Feature in OOo Calc (12 Oct 06)
I also highly recommend Bruce Byfield’s blog. Here are some of his articles on Calc:
- Pivot tables by another name (31 Jul 07)
- Options in OOo Calc (28 Jun 07)
- OpenOffice.org Calc function tools (27 Apr 07)
- Calc functions, part 2: Working with formulas (16 Apr 07)
- Calc functions, part 1: Understanding functions (30 Mar 07)
- Formatting cells in OpenOffice.org Calc (29 Dec 06)
- Printing in OpenOffice.org Calc, Part I: Page styles (19 Nov 06)
- Printing in OpenOffice.org Calc, Part 2: Print selection and printer options (26 Nov 06)
- Manipulating lists in OpenOffice.org Calc (29 Oct 06)
OpenOffice Calc Tips includes tips, templates and macros. It hasn’t been updated for several years, but what’s there looks good. Scroll down and click on one of the entries under “Archives” or “Categories” on the right-hand side.
