OpenOffice Calc & iWorks Numbers

Reply #9

GASMETERGUY — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 01:42:31 GMT

Prior to teaching myself VBA, I used Liberty Basic. While the program was good, my code still took two hours to run.

With Excel and VBA, that time has been reduced to one hour.

Now I am learning C++. Hopefully C++ will reduce the time even more.

Reply #8

time*treat — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 05:04:55 GMT

Yep. I'm still using some stuff that I wrote in Office Excel 97, too, and using reference books from back then.

With the exception of Office 2007, I think most of the changes after '97 are cosmetic. Not counting security patches.

If someone is just starting out (or maybe you just hate Redmond ), I'd say go with OO's Calc . The SB language seems robust enough.

If you think you might want to trade code w/ other people, then go w/ Excel (it still has a greater installed user base... [ More ]

Reply #7

Todd — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:37:38 GMT

What about looking around for a outdated version of Excel for sale?

If you looking for a great spreadsheet that does VBA, and is cheap as well, that would be the way to go. Getting the latest and greatest is of little value to most people, especially if your focus will be macros and VBA. There have been no significant changes to VBA in a long time, I would say either Excel/Office XP or Excel/Office 2003 is good.

Reply #6

time*treat — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:44:41 GMT

OO has its own programming language called 'StarBasic'. Earlier, I posted a link to an e-book (PDF) of the language manual.

If you wanted to convert your excel to calc, you would need to recode the VBA into the StarBasic. That's not a casual task for those of us with a lot of code behind us. But, it's good to know that the capability is there. The apple product, Numbers, has NO programming component to it, so that one is out, for me.

Reply #5

GASMETERGUY — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:34:51 GMT

I bought a copy of OpenOffice. OO will not support VBA. Or should I say OO did not have a function which would initiate my VBA Excel program.

What is will do is display your Excel program as if it were an Excel program. When I discovered the lack of support for VBA, I deleted the program and looked no further. OO may be suitable for what you are doing, however.

Reply #4

time*treat — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 01:27:32 GMT

The folks over at www.dmaths.org (select english/french in the sidebar) have an add-on for OO that lets you pull up functions easier, insert curves, and make diagrams.

May save you some keystrokes

Reply #3

johnph77 — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:43:52 GMT

time*treat -

Thanks for the link. You may just have solved a long-standing problem I've had with a project.

gl

j

Reply #2

time*treat — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:55:33 GMT

I found an online StarBasic book (274pg) after jumping through 3 or 4 links on the OO home page. So, I will keep OO around as an alt option.

Home --> Contributing --> Programming --> 'add a feature'

http://docs-pdf.sun.com/817-1826/817-1826.pdf

It shows how to do some of the more out of the way things.

Reply #1

time*treat — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:56:32 GMT

Wow +100 views 0 replies. Oh well ...

I did some digging and according to the review of Numbers over at macworld, my needs would be esoteric . No macro support in Numbers = total deal breaker.

There aren't many books on OO yet, so good may depend on how typical the needs of the user are. I'm beginning to suspect I might not want to make the jump just yet.

Currently, the update links for OO are full download links. All-or-None there, but as Calc doesn't yet have the same h... [ More ]

OpenOffice Calc & iWorks Numbers

time*treat — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:09:33 GMT

I'd like to know if either of these apps has macro capabilities as good as Excel.

Numbers has a nice video preview, but I need to know if I can write some real code with teeth behind the pretty graphs.

Calc looks like it has potential. I'd want a good book on it. I hate fishing around in 'help'. Any recos?

Also, right now I have OO 2.0 and I'd like to know if I can just DL a patch to 2.2 or if I have to get a new full 2.2 install...