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"Calc", available free as part of Open Office had been recommended, by 
Nicolas de Hilster, as a good alternative spreadsheet program to Excel.

I had asked whether anyone could recommend good printed documentation for 
using "Calc", comparable to the 1000-page manual available for Excel, as I 
had found great difficulties in using what I called "on-line help".

In reply, Scott Owen has pointed out that within Calc, there exists 
"in-program help". Well, that's exactly what I was trying to use, and 
finding it so difficult; but chose the wrong term to describe it. Sorry 
about that.

I would like to find a better manual that the one I have, which is a single 
volume covering all of OpenOffice.org 2, (etc) "All in One", by Greg Perry, 
which devotes 140 pages to Calc. Not nearly enough to do the job thoroughly. 
Frank Reed has suggested some search procedures for finding a suitable text, 
which I had tried already, without success. What I really need to find is 
someone who has and uses such a manual, that he can recommend. No Navlist 
member, yet, has put his hand up and identified such a manual for Calc, and 
it looks to me at present as if no such text exists.

Not that I've been trying to use Calc to do anything particularly exotic. 
But (for example) if you try using a spreadsheet to do any sort of recursion 
or accumulation, you soon find there are traps set to avoid "circular 
references". There are ways around this, but the Perry book doesn't mention 
them, or even acknowledge that a problem exists. By delving in the help 
files, once you have discovered the name that's been chosen to file this 
business under, you can work out what to do, but it's not a simple process.

So I'm still looking for that book.

George.
contact George Huxtable, at  george@hux.me.uk
or at +44 1865 820222 (from UK, 01865 820222)
or at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "George Huxtable" 
To: 
Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009 4:28 PM
Subject: [NavList 7014] Re: Constructing A Logarithm Table



Nicol�s de Hilster wrote, about choosing a spreadsheet program-

I would suggest Calc from OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/). It is
free, reads (and can save) MicroSoft Excel sheets and works cross-platform.

===================================

I have little doubt that Calc (which came free, as a part of Open Office) is
indeed powerful. I have tried, quite hard, to use it. But is there decent
printed documentation for it? The only manual I could find combined all
aspects of Open Office, so it was over-condensed. Many important features of
Calc, available in the program itself, went unmentioned in that manual. And
if you can't find that a feature exists, it might as well not be there.

I'm aware that "online help" is available, but that's one of my pet hates,
for any software. I'm much happier riffling through the pages of a book (if
it has a decent index) then digging through menus and submenus for stuff
that's been cunningly concealed. And quite a lot of the online help with
Calc has been obscurely written and is hard to understand.

In comparison, my old copy of Excel 2000 has a superb manual of over 1000
pages, to which much attention has been given to making it clear and
comprehensive.

If Nicol�s can recommend a better printed manual for Calc, I will go back
and try it again. There's a big in-principle attraction, for me, in free
software that can be updated for nothing, compared with expensive commercial
stuff that becomes no-longer supported, then calls for expensive upgrading.

George.

contact George Huxtable, at  george@hux.me.uk
or at +44 1865 820222 (from UK, 01865 820222)
or at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.






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