Will Open Office spreadsheet do for occasional Excel work?
 

My wife uses Excel at work, and occasionally will need to do some work from home. I don't have Excel (never really needed, and sadly don't really know how to operate it).

I don't feel like shelling out the $$ to buy a program we'll hardly use, so I wonder if the Open Office version of Excel will suffice in this case? I believe it's called Calc.

I use Word constantly, and remember hating Open Office's word processor when my cheap-ass company switched. But it did the job fine.

Thoughts?

Re: Will Open Office spreadsheet do for occasional Excel work?
 

I don't about calc, but your wife should check with the IT guys at work and see what kind of license they have for Office, she may be able to get a copy from work to use at home.

Re: Will Open Office spreadsheet do for occasional Excel work?
 

Unless she does really fancy stuff with Excel (macros, or integration with other Office apps) she should be fine. Even the fancy stuff will catch-up, but it'll probably stay a year behind Office's moving target of features.

Re: Will Open Office spreadsheet do for occasional Excel work?
 

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1851001,00.asp
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1874157,00.asp
http://www.openoffice.org/product/reviews.html
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/80012/openoffice-2.html

Re: Will Open Office spreadsheet do for occasional Excel work?
 

Gnumeric is another pretty good open source spreadsheet, that can import/export Excel files.