For the most part OpenOffice.org does what an office suite needs to do and thus far it has served me well. Recently however, I came across two features that affected me as an average user of spreadsheet applications.
Firstly, I wanted to draw a chart of data that wasn’t located in contiguous regions of the spreadsheet. That is, the cells weren’t next to one another. Step one: Create a blank chart. Step two: Right click in the chart and select “Data Ranges.” So far, Excel and Calc work exactly the same.
OpenOffice.org Calc Data Range selection dialog for charts
Step three: After clicking on Y-values, click the little “sheet with arrow” (or “Go To Sheet”) button under Range for Y-Values.
OpenOffice.org Calc Data Range selection dialog for charts
Still, so far so good. But step four is where the wheels come off: Select the cells containing the data you want to display (bold in the picture above). Psych! In Calc you can’t do the usual CTRL+Click you’re used to. It only lets you select a contiguous area of cells. The second you click it goes back to the dialog in the first picture with the cell(s) you selected. In Excel this is obviously not the case otherwise the topic of this post wouldn’t be what it is.
Another thing Calc’s charting feature lacks is the ability to use different types of graphs in the same chart. For instance, drawing a line graph over a bar graph. With OpenOffice charts have to be homogeneous. Hopefully this is just for the time being.
Going back to Office for the first time in years, and trying Excel 2007 at the same time, I have to say that while I love all things open source, in fairness, you get what you pay for when it comes to office/productivity software. If you don’t need all the features and the slick interfaces then there’s no reason to fork out the big bucks for Microsoft Office. If you do need and/or want those things then sadly, you need to pay for them.
The graph I wanted to draw can be seen at the top of my latest article at Hellforge: Recession finally catching up, or do the new games just suck? I’ll syndicate it to Entropy eventually, but I would still like to do a post where I compare GNOME and KDE as shipped with Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.04. I was pleasantly surprised by how well GNOME shapes up.