At 14:41 03/05/2021 +0100, Robin Lord wrote:
I don't agree open office calc is pretty much identical to excel, ...
All spreadsheet programs are similar, of course: they simply have to
be. Is that what you mean by "pretty much identical"? My point was
not to suggest that OpenOffice (Calc) and Microsoft Excel were
particularly different, but to say that approaching any new product
expecting it to be identical to another was ill advised. I feel that
users sometimes expect facilities in a new product to appear just as
they did in their previous experience and then reject the new product
as wanting as soon as they find this not to be so. (The current
questioner's use of the term "equivalent" suggested that he might
have been guilty of this.)
Such users will also miss facilities present in the new product that
they know nothing of. Here's an example. Suppose you want to
concatenate the text in two adjacent spreadsheet cells into a single
cell. In OpenOffice, you can merge the two cells - when OpenOffice
will offer to combine the contents and even helpfully interpose a
blank character - and then immediately unmerge them. The combined
text ends up in the first cell. Of course you can achieve the same
result in Microsoft Excel, but not (I believe) in the same way or
indeed anywhere near as easily.
... before I retired the only major difference I found was the
number of rows in excel was much bigger, ...
You may have missed some of OpenOffice's advantages!
Brian Barker
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