OpenOffice.org

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The latest version of Open Office is pretty good - it can handle some pretty hairy Excel spreadsheets and can even print directly to PDF, a very useful feature.

But, there are still some show stopping problems with it.

  • It uses semicolons instead of commas in formulae? What?!
  • It requires the '=' sign to start a formula instead of '+' like Excel.

Look, if you want people to change from the market leading spreadsheet product (and undoubtedly Microsoft's best software product), you can't do it by changing all of the finger macros that real spreadsheet geeks (like me) have developed from using Excel for years. Thirteen years or so, in my case.

If I can't sit down and make a simple spreadsheet with some VLOOKUPs and COUNTIFs on absolute row or column ranges without having to scour through the online help, I'm simply not going to change.

Oh, and make the macro language something modern like perl or python. Or better yet, provide an API so that any language can be used.

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This page contains a single entry by dave published on November 12, 2006 10:33 PM.

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