

Trying to use Calc as a replacement for Excel, or to routinely excehange documents between the two, requires a lot more technical expertise, testing and fiddling than it's worth. In the meantime, I believe the best options are to either: plan a migration to OOo, or stick with MS Office. The software underneath is completely different, and there are some fundamental differences that would require re-writing Calc from the ground up to change. But "generally interoperable" is not the same as "drop-in replacement".

And Calc is already "generally interoperable with Excel" and Calc is being changed every day to be more interoperable with Excel-where it is practical to do so. Is it a goal of OOo to be generally interoperable with Excel?Ībsolutely. Seems like a great opportunity, imo, for OOo to make headway via cross-functionality.Įdit: Just noticed this thread with some great discussion about this and someone wanting to learn Excel using Calc. Last I knew MS Office contains something like 90%+ of the market space.? I'm honestly not sure if that is purely businesses, home, or both though. For example MS Word used to have a setting to make it look/feel like WordPefect and stole quite some marketshare from them. In general, as much as anyone can say, is it a goal of OOo to be generally interoperable with Excel? From the standpoint of a User Experience I would think that interoperability would go a long way to helping people leave MS Office for OOo. If you want to move sheets back and forth, you will want to do very careful analysis, development and testing to make sure that your sheets behave the same on both. There are lots of subtle (and not so subtle) differences like this. xls correctly, but I haven't tested it in Excel.Īcknak wrote:Calc is not an Excel clone. I'm not sure if it will still export/import to Excel properly. The problem is that ADDRESS has recently been changed in Calc to take an extra parameter. E.g., in Calc, a sheet name like "10" must be quoted in a cell reference: '10'.$B$4.

That avoids any assumptions about the syntax of a cell reference ADDRESS should produce a syntactically correct address in both Excel and Calc.

=INDIRECT(ADDRESS(4 2 1 1 TRIM(RIGHT(A4 2))) Instead of =INDIRECT(TRIM(RIGHT(A4 2))&"!$B$4"), or digging out the correct separator character (a clever solution, Villeroy!), why not something like: this will break cross-functionality with my co-workers using Excel.Ĭalc is not an Excel clone.
