Understanding Electronic Spreadsheets

Although electronic spreadsheet applications often seem awkward to users at first, they are extremely powerful and commonplace tools in office environments. To use an electronic spreadsheet, you provide lists of numbers or data to OpenOffice.org Calc along with the formulas and calculations that should be used to manipulate them. OpenOffice.org Calc documents consist of rows and columns of cells, each of which can contain one of four things:

• Empty space

• Text

• A number

• A formula that will be used to perform calculations using the text or numbers in one or several other cells

The combination of these four types of data can lead to a surprising breadth and depth of powerful numerical and data management tools. And because OpenOffice.org Calc can read and save files in Microsoft Excel format, OpenOffice.org Calc users can exchange files with Microsoft Office users everywhere.