Open Office Help

General Computing Microsoft Windows
1

I’m having some trouble with Open Office. I think some of it it is related to me using a mix of OOo and MS Office.

Firstly and the most annoying of all, is that OOo seems to paste tables from Open Office Calc into OO Writer as pictures. Well by pictures I mean I cant change the cell’s at all without editing it in Calc then repasting into Writer. This annoys the whatsits off me. It wasn’t a problem when I started using Linux and OOo but now after so many essay’s at Uni, it’s driving me silly. Is there no way to paste a table as a table ala Excel and Word?

Secondly, the formula writer, whilst better than the one in MS Office, it can drive me mad trying to get the right sections of formula’s in the right lines. I’ve taken to using lots of brackets to get the right bits where they’re supposed to be. Guess there’s no walk around to this?

Thirdly, Excel compatibility with graphs seems dire. I’ve taken to using a VM image of Windows 2000 with Office installed just to do the graphs as the graphing editor in OOo seems to suck. Is it just me that finds this? It seems a bit more fussy. After some messing it appears I can make graphs with OOo but it’s less intuitive and more difficult than Excel. Any graphs I seem to create in an Excel sheet looks awful in OOo when I open it. (and very often than not, the axis are the wrong way round)

I admit I’ve been saving my work in Word and Excel compatible files as the university uses them (as do most of the world) so I felt I was pretty stuck into using MS Office file types but recently I’ve thought about moving to and sticking to OOo formats (is it .odt and .ods for docs and spreadsheets?) Would this help alleviate some of my troubles? I mean I always try and carry my USB key with me whilst I’m at Uni and on this I have a Open Office Portable on that I can use to edit them whilst somewhere else so it’s not like I’m not able to play with the files at Uni now. The only downside is if I need to print them at Uni. Will OOo portable be able to help me out here? Mind I did see at some point that MS where bringing in support for OOo formats to allow the files to be opened as read only in Office (to let users then save as .doc, .xls etc) so if needs be, I’ll be able to print them out like that.

2

The compatability issues I’ve come across are with macros/VB scripting in Excel. They don’t like each other at all and won’t work when converting. Basic table functions work OK, but as you say I have had issues with graphs too.

3

Agreed on the graphs, it’s one of the biggest things to hit me when I tried OO. The other was the lack of “text to columns” function found in excel. Eventually found out that gnumeric does that, but alas its no better on graphs.

As scary as it may sound, I found myself looking at buying MS office just for excel. The home/student version I’m told allow you to install on up to 3 PCs on a site so doesn’t work out that expensive. Ok, it isn’t free, and it isn’t linux, but if you need excel, that seems to be one of the cheapest ways to get it.

4

It does. I’m not entirely sure. I’ve got Excel on my laptop so I guess that can suffice until I get more experienced but the graphs are a sod.

5

The Graphics part can be called with other tools. You can get that with even MSWORKS. I have seen it on almost every application MS makes. So check out MSWorks if do Graphics is required, and yes STUDENT gives 3 installs!