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.