About a month ago I downloaded OpenOffice. It’s still sitting in my Downloads folder waiting for someone to double click it. Gee, I wonder when that’s going to happen. I think it would be fun to explore the Calc program and maybe even write a review of it. I’m just too busy to have fun lately.
Until I’m properly motivated, I’ve subscribed to Calc Tips which I heard about from j-walkblog.
I’ve been fooling around with oO Calc for a bit (specifically the programming environment).
My observations so far.
– There’s no intellisense.
Whilst that is no disaster in itself, there is no help either. None whatsoever on the object model. THAT’s a disaster combination of omissions.
There is a number of tools to compensate for these lacks, but there just not even half-way there.
– There’s no auto capitalisation. (I never realised how much I appreciate this feature of the VBE until I started writing code in oO). So you’re in the dark whether you spelled a variable correct or not.
– There is no Parent object. If e.g. you have a range object, there is no simple way to deterimine what workbook that range belongs to
– There is no shortcut key to access the Basic Editor (no big deal, but if you’re used to having one…)
My feelings toward oO as a developer: It takes you back to the very early Excel 5.0a days, which introduced VBA. But at least that was delivered with a relatively complete Help system.
Apart from these (programming) issues, my impression is that it is a quite complete spreadsheet program. It doesn’t play in the same league as Excel though.
But it is the only free program that can handle loading corrupt Excel files reasonably well.
I’ve used OO and feel they get a lot of credit for what was accomplished for free. This is just the beginning and it will only get better.
I like to write code, but let’s face it, that’s not what is needed for most users. The competition will force Microsoft to be more.
I agree with you on the code, the majority of users never uses that.
But I just wanted to vent my comments as a developer.
Hi all,
We need to keep in mind that it took MSFT nearly 20 years to get where Excel is today.
The really interesting spreadsheet-software is GNumeric, which is only available on the Linux-platform.
Check out its list of functions here:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/functions.shtml
Kind regards,
Dennis
I have to copy this…
I know I shouldn’t, but this blog post I found is just too good to NOT display it- please go to http://ewbi.blogs.com/develops/2005/03/microsoft_think.html to see Microsoft’s marketing sucks (re: their latest campaign with dinosaurs, etc).Anyway, I k…