Is there a clone for MS Excel? I do not use this program so I am not sure what to look for as far as features go. Is their something similar to Excel in Star Office or Open Office?

Im in the process of switching our company ' www.vector-industries.com ' to 100% free-software (as in freedom) and while doing so, someone thought it'd be OK to convert tons of Word documents that employs entered in data manually into for Price lists and totals into a MS Excel documents!

After explaining that we're going to be using free-software.... Some people just don't understand.

Hello,
yes, there are a few clones. Openoffice has Calc. It does more or less everything MSExcel does, atleast those things that you would need in everyday use. It also has support for scripting through SunBasic like Excel has through VBScript; although don't expect OpenOffice Calc to understand VBScript code. That means, you have to rewrite all the VBScript macros using SunBasic. That's a major catch for serious Excel users.

hope that helps.

I remember hearing some fishy things about Staroffice and it's license. Is it under the GPL? or an equivilent in the respects that it offers it's source and non-proprietary functions?

I'm not quite sure of what license StarOffice is currently under, but the last I saw, StarOffice 6.0 wasn't free. So I switched from StarOffice to OpenOffice (that's under GPL or something similar I guess). And if you don't want to use any of those big replacements, there's also KOffice for KDE, or Gnumeric for GNOME (http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/). You can try them out, but they aren't as powerful as OpenOffice Calc.