{"id":345,"date":"2007-03-13T09:38:48","date_gmt":"2007-03-13T15:38:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.codedread.com\/archives\/2007\/03\/13\/openoffice-calc-no-thanks-for-now\/"},"modified":"2007-03-13T09:38:48","modified_gmt":"2007-03-13T15:38:48","slug":"openoffice-calc-no-thanks-for-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/03\/13\/openoffice-calc-no-thanks-for-now\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenOffice Calc:  No Thanks For Now"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I've been working on making my OpenSUSE 10.2 box my permanent home computing environment for a few months now, I've got it set up for web browsing, development, media catching.  I tried recently to open a rather large personal finance-related spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc and was appalled.  <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The Excel workbook has roughly ten worksheets, lots of data, many graphs, many cells that are dependent upon other cells through formulae, many styled cells and no macros.  Upon opening in Calc, the window froze for roughly five minutes (refusing to repaint).  After this, Calc came up.  The overall look\/functionality of the workbook was intact, but many of the cells now had invalid values in them.  I traced the chain of invalid values back to a column of Date cells that had formula like:<\/p>\n<div class=\"code\">=DATE(103, 10, 1)<\/div>\n<p>I remembered that Excel uses 1900 as the basis for dates, so the formula gets calculated in Excel to be Oct 1st, 2003.  However, Calc expected the full 4-digit date (\"2003\").  I wonder why Calc didn't interpret the cell as Oct 1st, in the year 103 AD?  Anyway, after fixing the top cell the window to:<\/p>\n<div class=\"code\">=DATE(2003, ROW()+10, 10)<\/div>\n<p>the Calc window froze again for about 1 minute.  When it came back, the cell's contents were now valid.  I fixed the rest of the column formula problems by copying and pasting into the workbook and had to wait for another minute or so while Calc churned away on that.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously Calc was struggling to auto-calculate with each change in the cell contents, so I did a quick web search and learned how to turn off Auto-Calculate (Tools > Cell Contents > Auto-Calculate should be <strong>unchecked<\/strong>).  Problem with that is that now when I've made my changes, I still need to hit F9 (or is it Ctrl+Alt+F9) to force a recalculate and I have to wait a minute or two with the window frozen.  This is simply unacceptable behavior when the competing product, Microsoft Excel, does this in the background at near-instant speed.<\/p>\n<p>I've read in some forums that this might have to do with cells that have custom styles on it.  At the moment, I simply do not have time nor patience to re-build my workbook from the ground up, piece-by-piece to see what the offending style\/graphic is.  So for now, OpenOffice Calc has lost a user.<\/p>\n<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"http:\/\/www.codedread.com\/googleads.js\"><\/script><br \/>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been working on making my OpenSUSE 10.2 box my permanent home computing environment for a few months now, I&#8217;ve got it set up for web browsing, development, media catching. I tried recently to open a rather large personal finance-related spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc and was appalled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,25,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","category-software","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.codedread.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}