A First Look at OpenOffice.org 1.0 - page 4

Evaluating the OpenOffice.org 1.0 Production Release

Calc is the OpenOffice.org answer to spreadsheets. Many businesses, such as accountants and statisticians make extensive use of spreadsheets and develop all manner of macros and processes to help them analyze their numbers. Since I use spreadsheets for keeping tabular data, lists and doing some charting, my evaluation focused strictly on the basics.

Importing an Excel spreadsheet proved to be a breeze. Loading of the .xls file actually seemed to take less time than importing a similar StarOffice spreadsheet. The formatting and text looked pretty normal.

I created a simple x/y chart using some fictional revenue data to try out the charting wizard (see Figure 4). The wizard walked through defining the column data, specifying the first column as the label, as well as specifying the x and y titles. You have the choice usual choice of line, bar and pie charts. The spreadsheet and chart displayed correctly on Excel on the Windows 2000 box.

One spreadsheet I made contained some simple calculations and sorting of columns. Multiplying numbers were handled in the traditional way, equals sign followed by data, then an operator, followed by the next data element, and so on. Hitting enter at the end of the operation caused the result to be calculated, just like always. Sorting of columns of numbers and text also had no surprises.