Using Open Source, Part 2: OpenOffice Calc
by Doug Anger
This week's column is the second in a short series of articles on using Open Source software. For those of you who missed last week's column, it is available online at http://compass.lssu.edu/content/view/437/51/. This week, we continue with the OpenOffice suite by reviewing the spreadsheet application Calc.
For those of you who missed last week's column, OpenOffice.org is a free suite of office programs consisting of five main programs: a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation program (Impress), a drawing program (Draw), and a database program (Base). OpenOffice will run on Windows, Linux, and the X11 environment on Mac OS X.
About OpenOffice Calc
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OpenOffice Calc is a full-featured spreadsheet program similar to AppleWorks spreadsheet and Microsoft Excel. It can open Excel workbooks as well as its own Open Document Spreadsheet format and convert between the two with no problems that I have found. It can also export directly to Adobe PDF format.
Calc can handle a wide variety of formulas to compute the value of a cell automatically like other spreadsheet programs. It supports styles in the same manner as Writer to make it easy to create spreadsheets that are functional and look nice. Calc is more than powerful enough to handle anything a typical college student will throw at it.
For math and business majors, a free Optimization Solver add-on is available that will allow Calc to solve linear programs and do optimization modeling. An algorithm is being worked on to support non-linear programs as well.
Should You Switch?
As I said last week, OpenOffice comes as a single suite, not a collection of separate applications and any decision to switch would be better made after looking at the whole OpenOffice suite. You can do this on your own or wait for next week's column to learn about OpenOffice Impress and Draw.
OpenOffice is free. However, like most open source software however, it comes with no warranty and no support line. If you can't figure something out, your options are most likely limited to the built-in help system, searching the Internet, and phoning a friend.
If you decide to switch (from Microsoft Office at least), converting files to Calc's format won't be necessary because Calc can directly open Excel documents. However, if you save all your files in OpenOffice format and decide to switch back to Excel, expect to spend some time opening them all and saving them as Excel files manually.
If you decide to try OpenOffice, you can get it by going to http://www.openoffice.org/, clicking on the get openoffice.org button, and following the instructions for your platform.

Stay tuned for Using Open Source, Part 3: OpenOffice Impress & Draw next week.
