I've heard of freeware that is comparable to MS Word & MS Excel.
1) do you know the names?
2) know where to get them?
3) know any site that compares the features--are they really comparable? what MS features are noticeably lacking in the freeware?
if you need the really complex formulas & functions of Excel, will Open Office have that?
?
Favorite Answer
OpenOffice is a very well-known one. Recently, many contributors from the OpenOffice community began working on a new project, LibreOffice, which is based off of OpenOffice, since Oracle announced they wouldn't be supporting commercial development or something.
Another free online alternative is Google Docs. Although I don't like it myself, you can use it for free and multiple users can work together at the same time.
For a vague comparison, you can check on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites#Comparison_of_general_and_technical_information
In Open Office, Calc is the equivalent of Excel.
"OpenOffice.org Calc is the spreadsheet component of the OpenOffice.org software package.
Calc is similar to Microsoft Excel, with a roughly equivalent range of features. Calc is capable of opening and saving most spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel file format. It provides a number of features not present in Excel, including a system that automatically defines series for graphing based on the layout of the user's data. Calc is also capable of writing spreadsheets directly as PDF files.?
A comparison, from Wikipedia, shows that
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An advantage of Calc over Excel is that it directly uses metrics when defining the width of a cell or column, or the height of a cell or row. This number can be expressed in either cm, mm, inches, picas or points.
Calc also has some additional functions, like EASTERSUNDAY, which works most years. Other ones, like DAYS and YEARS (which calculate date differences) can be replaced by Excel's DATEDIF function.[3]
Calc fully supports the conditional formatting of Excel 97-2003, but it supports neither the changes implemented from the 2007 version of Microsoft's software, nor the "data bars" that can be associated to specific cells.
Unlike Microsoft's product (even Excel 2010), Calc offers a more sophisticated function wizard, that lets the user navigate through nested formulas. This feature is particularly useful when working with some complex sheets, to debug nested functions.
It is possible in Calc to undo the "Delete Sheet" operation, which Excel is incapable of.
Although Calc offers a feature similar to Excel's PivotTables (called DataPilot), it doesn't have an equivalent for PivotCharts, which somewhat limits the possibility to share spreadsheets between these applications when used for data analysis.
OpenOffice also allows users to save files in the .dbf (the old dBASE database file) format, support for which has been removed from Excel 2007. Although the .dbf is a legacy format, some programs (e.g. ESRI's ArcGIS) use the .dbf as the basis for handling all spreadsheet data. OpenOffice allows you to directly edit and save changes to GIS spreadsheet files, while Excel only offers import of .dbf files to be saved in a different format.
Calc does not have any add-ins for real-time stock quotes. However, live streaming financial data can be provided with two commercial packages for Mathematica, CalcLink[4] and DDFLink.[5]
Calc did not have the "Solver" add-in until version 3.0, while Excel has had this since Office 97 as an add-in[6] or perhaps earlier.
In relation to macros, Calc's BASIC functions are basically like those of its competitor, although it lacks a few of them, like InStrRev (which reversely looks up a substring within a string). Calc's object model however, is rather different from Excel's, and it doesn't support the easy-editing feature of Microsoft's product, via the object.property or object.procedure (object.method) "smart" characteristic (inherited from the Visual Studio programming environment).
Calc doesn't have XLM macros that are embedded in Excel.
Calc (unlike Excel) can use Python, JavaScript, C++ and CLI as additional macro languages.
Calc supports use of regular expressions in find and replace operations, whereas Excel only supports limited wildcard searching.
Calc supports use of complex numbers which Excel doesn't."
For your second question, I'm going to have to guess yes, since I've never used Calc myself and only the Writer program of Open Office.
Anonymous
Open Office free here
http://www.openoffice.org/
Anonymous
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widder28
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