Star Office (SO) is very good, however it is not MS Excel. Excel is
significantly more powerful than SO. Therefore it does not have all he
functions and functionality of MS Excel.
As such when opening more complex spreadsheets in Star Office you will
encounter many problems, trying to solve these may well end up costing more
than if you had stuck to Excel, both in terms of time and pounds.

Hope that helps
__________________________
Naz
London


"Graham Haughs" wrote:

I really need some guidance on this one so that I know what I am dealing
with. Our IT department in their wisdom, feel that Star Office is now
the way forward. To cut this as short as possible we have a range of
Excel programs all of which have macros, functions, data validation etc.
Not a problem they tell me, the Excel spreadsheets just load directly
into Star Office. I loaded one into Star Office spreadsheets and the
first thing it did was assume all the macros were viruses and put a REM
statement at the start of every line of code.
Any cells where there were functions had error messages. Any data
validation drop downs were non existent. Nothing of course will work.
Not a problem they tell me again there is software which can be
downloaded from the web and it will re-write all the code to the same as
required by Star Office, presumably after it had cleared the REM. How it
would handle functions, validation, user forms etc I have no idea but I
am only a child of a lesser god and bow to the knowledge of these IT
specialists. Basically I think they are talking rubbish but I need
someone to confirm that to me, or indeed tell me I am talking rubbish. I
think that each program would need to be re-written in Star Office code
and functions etc used which are those of Star Office and not Excel as
they are based on VBA. I would really value all comments on this or
pointers to where I can have my doubts substantiated or removed. I am
not trying to knock Star Office I just don't think that the simplicity
of what I am being told is correct.
Grateful thanks for your time.

Kind Regards
Graham Haughs
Turriff, Scotland