Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Yesterday we looked at Open Office Writer, the Open Source word processing application. Today we’ll take a short look at Calc, the spreadsheet part of the free (as in beer) office suite. I spent much of my life as an analyst, dealing on a daily basis with a wide variety of spreadsheets, many of them fairly complex. I still spend a fair amount of time with spreadsheets.

I have now built a couple of dozen spreadsheets with Calc, one of the two most important components of Open Office, at least for me, along with Writer. I do a lot of spreadsheets for myself and my tiny enterprises. As I said, historically, I have always done that for myself and my clients. I am just an analyzing fool. Well, anyway, a fool of some kind.  ;o)

I have never felt lost in Calc, even though its interface is not an exact match for that of MS Excel. Everything about the interface is intuitive enough that you just know where to find things. I don’t feel like I have lost any time at all since moving to Calc, even after 20 years or so as an Excel user. I especially  appreciate the simplicity and ease of use of the graphing interface in Calc, much better than one of the “quirkiest” features of Excel.
I have used Excel as a reporting tool for MS SQL Server in the past, although against my better judgment, and I don’t think that is likely to work with Calc. I do note, however, that you can write macros in Python and Java, and that they have their own “basic” language. I am also sure that if I dug around long enough, I would find functions that Excel has and Calc doesn’t. However, after loading some pretty exotic analysis spreadsheets from my Excel past, all of the pieces seem to be there. That is very impressive. Looking through the function list, there are even a few that I do not recognize from the Microsoft product.

I just don’t see any gaping holes in Open Office Calc. I’m currently doing some regression analysis on social networking data: positive and negative ratings, umber of ratings, category, time of day, etc. Open Office Calc seems perfectly happy to go in any silly direction that I lead it, returning exactly the metrics I want. You can’t ask any more of a spreadsheet application than that. If my office suite decision were to be based strictly on spreadsheets, the answer would be Open Office Calc by a neck.