General Open Office Excel Tips

This is information a student posted that could be very helpful:

I know I can't be the only one using Open Office instead of Excel. I have noticed some of the ways of doing things are different, so I will list where stuff is in Open Office.

To wrap text select the cell and right click or go to format then cells and go to the alignment tab. On the bottom there will be an unchecked box next to the words "Automatic Line Break." If you check that the text will be wrapped.

Instead of having file/page setup like Excel, in Open Office you have to go to Format then Page. It doesn't contain all of the same things as page setup does in Excel.

You cannot merge cells by right clicking on them and going to format, you must go to format/merge cells on the menu bar.

The only way I have found to make sure that all the columns of your table fit on the page(One page wide) is to go to Format/Page then on the Sheet tab there will be a heading of scale. It doesn't give a width or height limit, but it does give a specific number of pages to fit something on to.

These are just some points I thought were pretty different from Excel and thought I would point out incase anyone is having trouble with them.

A LITTLE MORE

These are tips for adjusting the Microsoft Excel instructions to Open Office. They are not meant to be very explicit, so if you have a great deal of trouble using open office, please go to the library to use Microsoft Excel.

General

Most page setup options are instead under the format menu's page option.

Save your file as "Microsoft Excel 97/2000/XP .xls", .

Step 17 - setting a header and footer - You can find this in format / page / header (or footer) and then hit the edit button

Step 18 - setting column headings - You can find this in format / print ranges and then click edit. Set "rows to repeat" to user defined and highlight all the cells that hold the column headings and press enter. (Choosing the row number itself wont work as it does in Excel.)

Step 19 - set to print only 1 page wide - format / page / sheet and then under "scale" set "scaling mode" to "fit print range to width/height" and then set width to 1 and height to 99.

Step 20 - set margins - format / page / page tab and set the margins there.

Other: Merging cells - format / merge cells instead of being in the format /cells option.

For the average and minimum, you just have to insert / function / choose all and then find the right function

For the if statement (more than 1), it has one tricky part. You have to put the yes in quotes, so you need to enter "yes" and "no". That would make it work.

If your finance chart isn't created properly double click on the chart to get it outlined, and then right click on the white part of the chart and choose data ranges. Click the box on the data range tab and outline just the payment values and years as the data range. (MS Office senses the interest labels and adjusts that, but open office does not. Click on data series and label the data by clicking on the series, and then click in range for name box and choose just the interest % cell as a label. This has to be done once for each row.