OpenOffice.org Calc

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OpenOffice.org Calc

OpenOffice.org Calc under Fedora
Developer:	Sun Microsystems in association with the community
Latest release:	2.2 / 28 March 2007
OS:	Cross-platform
Use:	Spreadsheet
License:	LGPL
Website:	www.openoffice.org

OpenOffice.org Calc is an open source/free software spreadsheet that is a component of the OpenOffice.org software package, available under the LGPL.

Calc is similar to Microsoft Excel, with a roughly equivalent range of features. It provides a number of features not present in Excel, including a system which automatically defines series for graphing based on the layout of the user's data. Calc is also capable of writing spreadsheets directly as PDF files.

Calc is capable of opening and saving spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel file format. The default format for OpenOffice.org 2.0 Calc can be set to either Microsoft Excel or the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF). Calc also supports a wide range of other file formats, for both opening and saving files.

As with the entire OpenOffice.org suite, Calc can be used across a variety of platforms, including Mac OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.

In some cases, Calc lacks the GUI wizard to access certain advanced features associated with competing products such as statistical capabilities like error bar support on graphs, and polynomial regression analysis, but you can still perform such calculations by manually entering the functions and relationships plus a few macros. Another FOSS application called Gnumeric provides easier access on these statistical analysis features by exposing them to users with Wizard.

1 DataPilot
2 Criticism
3 See also
4 External links
- 4.1 Tutorials
- 4.2 Study and Articles

[edit] DataPilot

The feature DataPilot provides similar functionality to that of Pivot table found in Microsoft Excel. It is used for interactive table layout and dynamic data analysis. Unlike Excel, however, OpenOffice.org does not support Pivot chart yet.

With OpenOffice.org 2.0, the DataPilot feature has added support of Page fields: you can now sort data on their fields.

[edit] Criticism

OpenOffice.org Calc has been criticized for:

Limited ability to customize charts (this is being addressed [1])
Lack of an integrated multivariate optimiser (solver) (project underway [2])
Calc has problems handling very large spreadsheets (20,000 rows, 100 columns) and can be 100 times slower than Excel[3]. This is in part due to the XML format for handling cell entries. A Novell Linux and GNOME hacker, Federico Mena-Quintero, has analyzed the cause of the slowdown at his blog[4] and offered some suggestions to improve the situation. This is not considered a critical issue since many users dealing with large datasets will use a database program such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. The OpenOffice.org Base module can be used to connect to external databases. Further work on improving Calc performance is currently being conducted[5] by other OpenOffice.org developers.