Using OpenOffice Calc instead of Microsoft Excel
With your first computer (or even your fifth!), don’t be too quick to buy Microsoft Office — there’s a great, free alternative called OpenOffice.
First, let me say it this way: “If you can use Excel, you can use Calc.”
It’s really that simple. Learning to use a spreadsheet — learning the concepts of putting variable data in some cells and putting formulas in other cells to calculate results based on the data — is the hard part.
With one tiny exception… Excel still has one of the Lotus 1-2-3 features that, for some reason, has not been implemented in OpenOffice. In both OpenOffice and Excel, you can start a formula with an equals sign (”=”).
In both OpenOffice and Excel, if you start a cell with a number, but then use any other character (alphabetic or an arithmetic operator like a plus sign), both will treat the cell contents as test — as a label.
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