MS Excel/OOo Calc question
 

I have an assignment in my MS office class to format some data in a .xlsx spreadsheet, but her directions don't make much sense to me, and I'd like a second opinion.



So, first things first, I'm using OOo which doesn't save in .xlsx, but hopefully that won't matter.

There are two tabs (just like tabs in a web browser) that need to be changed to blue and yellow respectively, but I don't much care about that right now..

The most important pieces that don't make any sense to me are the ones in bold.

It sounds like she wants me to take cell A1 (which is the name of the thing), and copy it across the top like a title, but "center it across"? WTF is center it across?

Also, she never specifically states a cell number anywhere in her instructions, except for A1, but am I supposed to change cell A1 to the tab color, or all the text under the tab to the tab color?

Just a guess on my part, but it sounds like she wants you to merge A1 through I1 and have the text in A1 centered.

It does save in .xls and I suspect that the instructor won't notice the difference. Just to be annoying, whenever someone sends me a file in office open format (or whatever the official MS name for that crapola is), I send it back and ask for a real format.

You might have to ask about this one. She could mean either the entire sheet or maybe just the tab (however I have no idea if Excel can change just the color of the tab).

Though I do have to say Dogs, I tip my hat to you for using OOo in an MS Office class. That is pleasantly cheeky.

Merge cells A1 through I1, then center the text, change it to bold and increase the text size to 12.


Change the fill color of the merged cells to "Gray-25%" on both pages.
Change the font color of the text in the merged cells to match the colors of their corresponding tabs (blue and yellow).

Yeah, how do you get away with something like that? Is the class online?

MS Excel has got an option called "Center across selection" in the format-->Cells options for which there is no identical option in OO. So since you use OO (and can save-as excel) you might lose some marks if the the instructor notices the difference between what she asked and what you submitted (merge the cells).

Anyway, all the best.

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1. You can center text in a cell in Open Office. Same text justification symbols work in Calc as in Writer.

2. Merging cells in OpenOffice is the same as in Excel, so merging cells A1 through I1 inclusive is no problem.

3. In the web site Open Office Ninja there is an add-on for Calc (the spreadsheet) called Color2Rows. I don't know if it will change tab colors, but check it out.

3. There are also add-ons for office open format files in Open Office, but I have to agree, I boycott the office open stuff when I can.

Thanks for the replies.

I've turned in a couple of assignments already that I did with OOo and I got A's on em, so I figure I'll get about that with this assignment as well.

If worst comes to worst and I can't make OOo behave, then I'll get most of it done, boot up XP, and do the finishing bit on MS O.

I haven't been able to find anything that would allow OOo to save in .xlsx, but that sure would be handy. If anyone knows of a way to do that, I'd appreciate a link to relevant material.

Have you tried posting your request in www.openoffice.org and its relevant support forums?

AFAIK you can save as xls and rename to xlsx because the internal format is backwards compatable.

Rename as xlsx wont do since xlsx is Microsoft's OpenXML file format which is different. For this last lap, you must open in excel and save as .. Doesn't seem to be any other option.

End

Or the best solution is to just convince to instructor to accept the format.
Especially since it is far better supported then xlsx.

If the xls format is acceptable to your instructor - with the explanation that you used OO, then I expect the instructor will also be amenable to trying a comparison between windows and linux.