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

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org

Reply via email to