5 reasons to use OpenOffice rather than Excel or Google

By Nick Crawley on April 15 2009

Having explored the capability and also limitations of Google Spreadsheets I have started evaluating the spreadsheet element of Open-Office and I am pleasantly surprised. If you recognise that Excel 2007 is not a great piece of software for the delivery of professional financial modelling services but think that Google spreadsheet isn’t quite what you need then Open-Office spreadsheet could well be your solution.

The screenshot below shows that at a high level it looks very similar in layout and presentation to Microsoft Excel and this blog entry provides a quick glimpse as the Navigator resource evaluation team commence testing.

Top of the worksheet

What does OpenOffice do that Google doesn’t (yet) ?

Open-Office delivers a suite of office productivity tools, of which the spreadsheet application is one. It looks and behaves in a very similar way to Microsoft Excel and has the following benefits over Google:

Columns go out to AMJ (that’s 256 years on a quarterly basis….)
It looks much more like Excel so easier to transition to
Data is stored locally not centrally
It has a Macro functionality that looks very similar to Visual Basic
It is quicker to use, no web delays

The screenshot below shows Solver in Open-Office. if you can use Excel Solver, this one is just as straightforward.

Solver add-in

How does OpenOffice compare to Excel?

It appears to have a huge portion of the functionality that Excel has, lets look at the similarities keeping in mind the weaknesses of Google.

The same menu structures and therefore keyboard shortcuts
In built routines such as Goal Seek and Solver are very similar
It allows Styles to be used
It has a neat ‘navigator’ feature which allows different objects to be found readily
Graphing and data presentation are very similar
Technically its Open Source so developments and debugging is exponentially quicker than a large corporation

Open Office could be used from tomorrow onwards to replace Excel. It is clearly designed to offer a very smooth transition for Excel users and captures the vast majority of what Microsoft Excel does really well and has focused on preserving that core functionality. Depending on how techy you are will no doubt affect your views on this platform as a new spread-sheeting tool, clearly whenever there is a choice different camps form, this can be seen here but on the whole I am very impressed and think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Some education of the market would be needed with many organisations not able to run an Open-Office application due to policy, however, I propose this is a solid alternative to Excel that can be downloaded, installed and used effectively within four and a half minutes! I know because thats what I did!