GETTING STARTED WITH OPENOFFICE CALC

By Remy Lentzner

This book focuses on CALC, the free OpenOffice spreadsheet application. You will study the basics, such as the different menus, the cells management, the manipulation of the rows and columns, the formatting of information, the printing layout, but also the realization of simple and complex calculations using functions.
You will discover other possibilities : the manipulation of dates, the charts, the lists of data and the pivot tables that enable you to create statistics easily. The macros will be presented.
This book is intended for people who want to progress and are looking for the different features of this spreadsheet.
Enjoy your reading !


ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Rémy Lentzner has been an IT trainer since 1985. Specialized in mastering office automation tools, he supports companies in the professional training of their employees. Self-taught, he has several computer books to his credit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Remylent
• Release date: Sep 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9782490275786

Book preview

Chapter 1

The working environment

This chapter shows the working environment with its menus group and different features.

1.1 At the beginning

As soon as OpenOffice is installed in your computer, a menu appears offering different available modules (figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 : Starting OpenOffice

You can work with the spreadsheet, the word processing, the slides manager, the database manager, the drawings and several tools to manipulate mathematical formulas. In each application, the Basic language is available to program macros.

After starting the spreadsheet, the main menu appears as shown in figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 : The different menus and icons

1.1.1 The File Menu

The File menu proposes the opening and closing classical features. After creating a new document, you can save it with the standard OpenDocument format .ODS but also with the Microsoft format .XLS but not with XLSX (for the time being). Be careful when transforming an OpenOffice file into Excel, the layout is not always exactly the same.

You can also export the data to a PDF file by specifying parameters via a dedicated dialog box. Some of these are interesting, especially those that define the security of the PDF file. Figure 1.3 shows the File menu and the different possibilities for saving a spreadsheet new document.

Figure 1.3 : Several saving formats are possible.

You can retrieve data from a wide variety of software, but pay attention to the layout