Open Office.org Calc - in Comparison To Microsoft Excel

In Comparison To Microsoft Excel

See also the Comparison of spreadsheets article.

• Very simple copy a table out of a web site, paste into an empty spreadsheet, and then sum up numbers does not work, as Calc implicitly stores the pasted numbers into text fields not usable for calculation.
• The GUI does not show the very important functions, like SUM, in the default view.
• An advantage of Calc over Excel is that it directly uses metrics when defining the width of a cell or column, or the height of a cell or row. This number can be expressed in either cm, mm, inches, picas or points.
• Calc also has some additional functions, like EASTERSUNDAY, which works most years. Other ones, like DAYS and YEARS (which calculate date differences) can be replaced by Excel's DATEDIF function.
• Calc fully supports the conditional formatting of Excel 97-2003 and version 3 or later also supports the 2007 version of Microsoft's software.
• Unlike Microsoft's product (even Excel 2010), Calc offers a more sophisticated function wizard, that lets the user navigate through nested formulas. This feature is particularly useful when working with some complex sheets, to debug nested functions.
• It is possible in Calc to undo the "Delete Sheet" operation, which Excel is incapable of.
• When selecting multiple cells, Calc supports deselecting cells.
• Although Calc offers a feature similar to Excel's PivotTables, it doesn't have an equivalent for PivotCharts, which somewhat limits the possibility to share spreadsheets between these applications when used for data analysis.
• OpenOffice also allows users to save files in the .dbf (the old dBASE database file) format, support for which has been removed from Excel 2007. Although the .dbf is a legacy format, some programs (e.g. ESRI's ArcGIS) use the .dbf as the basis for handling all spreadsheet data. OpenOffice allows you to directly edit and save changes to GIS spreadsheet files, while Excel only offers import of .dbf files to be saved in a different format.
• Calc does not have any add-ins for real-time stock quotes. However, live streaming financial data can be provided with two commercial packages for Mathematica, CalcLink and DDFLink.
• The solver function in Calc (3.0) is limited in the types of functions which allow convergence.
• In relation to macros, Calc's BASIC functions are basically like those of its competitor, although it lacks a few of them, like InStrRev (which reversely looks up a substring within a string). Calc's object model however, is ifferent from Excel's, and it doesn't support the easy-editing feature of Microsoft's product, via the object.property or object.procedure (object.method) "smart" characteristic (inherited from the Visual Studio programming environment).
• Calc doesn't have XLM macros that are embedded in Excel.
• Calc (unlike Excel) can use Python, JavaScript, C++ and CLI as additional macro languages.
• Calc supports use of regular expressions in find and replace operations, whereas Excel only supports limited wildcard searching.
• When editing multiple files simultaneously, changes can be undone and redone in each file independently.
• Calc supports dates from the year 1.
• Calc will omit native macros when saving in .xls format.