Ubuntu: Up and Running

Calc

The OpenOffice.org spreadsheet program is called Calc, and you’ll find it works in much the same way as other major spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Excel. As with Writer, there’s not enough room in this book to teach you how to use the program, but I at least can get you up and running by pointing out where the main options are.

To try out the Calc program, you can double-click the spreadsheet file Payment_schedule.ods in the example-content folder of your desktop, as shown in Figure 12-7.

The Standard Toolbar

The first thing you should notice is that the Standard and Formatting toolbars are quite similar to those in Writer, so I don’t need to explain them to you again in detail. This is the great thing about the integrated suite; the look and feel and functionality transfer between the various parts. Once you’ve learned one of the programs, you already know most of the other parts, too.

However, a few of the buttons do work slightly differently from their effects in text documents, and there are a couple of additional or replacement buttons as well, as shown in Figure 12-8.

So, for example, in the Standard toolbar the Table button in Writer is now replaced with two buttons in Calc that feature the letters A and Z, which are for sorting in either ascending or descending order, respectively. There is also a new button that looks like a pie chart and calls up the Chart Wizard (see Figure 12-9), and the nonprinting characters button is removed, as it’s not applicable to spreadsheets. ...