smartin wrote...
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[OT]
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Yours is the first post I have noticed in this group where OpenOffice
Calc was mentioned. Do you have an article comparing OOC and Excel?

Only some other newsgroup responses.

Here in very brief with no claims of completeness of even
comprehensiveness.

1. OOo Calc provides regular expressions in SOME worksheet functions
and EditFind/Replace. Excel provides nothing close.

2. OOo Calc worksheet references in 3D range references can be
relative or absolute. Excel worksheet references are always absolute.

3. OOo Calc provides a FORMULA function which returns the formula in
the referenced cell. Excel provides the XLM function GET.CELL which
can do the same, among many other things, but it can't be used
directly in cell formulas standard worksheets.

4. OOo Calc accepts more than 30 arguments and more than 7 levels of
function call nesting.

5. OOo Calc's ROW and COLUMN functions NEVER return arrays, which is a
real PITA, so formulas like

=LOOKUP(1E300;1/(A1:A1001000);ROW(A1:A100))

to return the row number of the LAST cell in A1:A100 that's greater
than 1000 require references to ranges containing sequential integers
in OOo Calc.

6. More generally but without details, OOo Calc can handle only a
subset of Excel array formulas.

7. OOo Calc is A LOT SLOWER than Excel when recalculating large
workbooks.

8. OOo has poor documentation. Excel's online help has its flaws,
including some outright errors that haven't been corrected in over a
decade, but it's much more complete.

9. OOo Calc and Excel 2003 and prior provide usable UIs. Excel 2007
provides the dog's lunch UI. The greatest favor Microsoft has ever
done for a competitor is placing restrictions in the lincensing terms
of the effluent UI that prohibit its use in products competing
directly against Office.