Ubuntu® Linux® Bible

Chapter 11. Other Office Software: Spreadsheets and Presentations

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using spreadsheets: A tutorial

• Using Gnumeric

• Using OpenOffice Calc

• Creating presentations with Impress

The previous chapter discussed how to create documents on your Ubuntu system. Along with surfing the Web and sending and receiving e-mail, writing letters, TODO lists, and working on your novel are probably the most common personal tasks that you'll find yourself doing on your new machine. Word processing is also a fairly critical business task because, although most companies live on e-mail nowadays, there's still always the need for the occasional memo, planning document, and so on.

This chapter discusses the other office-related software that's available for your Ubuntu Linux system, namely spreadsheets and presentation software. While few people actually need to give presentations on their home computer or to their family (maybe "Next Month's Budget—What It Means To You"?), spreadsheets are a crossover task that is often as important to home users as it is to office workers. If you are working from home or using Ubuntu on a laptop for business reasons, you may need to create both spreadsheets and presentations, and Ubuntu Linux makes this easy (well, as easy as it is on any computer system).

Ubuntu Linux Desktop, OEM, or Text-Mode installations automatically install the OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet application as part of the OpenOffice.org suite, and the easy-to-use Synaptic Package Manager makes ...