Spreadsheet for scientists and engineers
 

Hi.
I have been using Excel 2003 for many years mainly for storing and manipulating data, performing simple statistical analysis and making exploratory plots. I.e., Excel is used to get a feel of the data before i export them to R, matlab or other specialized software for serious computation.

Would OOCalc be a competent alternative? I am concern mainly about the comprehensiveness of mathematical functions, plotting features and the ability run addon (xla) files. And how would they compare with Symphony, Gnumeric and Resolver One?

A bigger question is whether the OO or Symphony suite is anywhere as good as the office suite as I do make dissertation-style documents and presentation slides.

Thanks!

Well, you can always try the OO spreadsheet (personally I usually use a database and some file format like NetCDF); OO spreadsheet does feel a bit clunky compared to MS Excel, but you'll have to see for yourself and decide. You can always run MSOffice under WINE.

There's nothing I've seen for Linux which compares with PowerPoint, so forget about the slides, but PowerPoint will also run under WINE.

Now for MSWord - OO does a reasonable job on most things; you'll have to try it yourself and see. I've never played with things like templates, background images, and so on because I only use OO for writing the simplest of letters or for editing documents that other people send me; for all my serious publication work I use TeX/LaTeX (and gnuplot to make plots, some diagrams are programmed in PostScript - but hey, that's probably just me - then again I have at least 2 buddies who do that too).

I much prefer Gnumeric over any other spreadsheet program I've tried. And, you should know that it is one of the most accurate spreadsheet program around. It is more accurate than either Excel or OpenOffice.

I wouldn't rely on the ability to run xla files in OO Calc or any other excel add-on. If you can still do what you want without any excell-specific add-ons, then it is worth continuing to consider it, otherwise not.

When I last looked at Gnumeric v OO (this would be back at OO ~1.3 and so may be significantly out of date by now) I was very disappointed by the lack of text and string processing functions in Gnumeric. This may not be a factor for you.

I don't really (yet?) have a good solution if you need a bibliography function; kbib/kbiblio is good, works well, works the way I want it to, but isn't directly compatible with OO (I'm guessing its directly compatible with Koffice, but I haven't looked at that for really quite a while). There is the possibility of exporting from kbib and converting with a python script and then importing into OO but I haven't tried that yet and it may just be too clunky to bother with.

And OO 3 is alleged to make improvements in this (minute) area, so my default is to wait and see what OO 3 looks like.

I am sorry to say, but I don't find OOcalc an adequate replacement for Excel. It offers enough (and maybe more) mathematical functions. But it falls short seriously for graphing. Many times I have not been able to create a decent graph of my data, add or edit series, or whatever. The user interface for creating graphs is horrible and non coherent, and I have often spent hours to get right in Calc what I did in Excel in 10 minutes.

Gnumeric has a much better interface, but (like many Gnome applications) it is sometimes too simple. But what Gnumeric does, it does it very well.

Building macros using OOBasic is on the edge of undoable. The language is designed such that a framework is set for an extremely powerful, orthogonal and versatile programming tools. But that makes it so complicated that even simple tasks require multi 100-character lines instead of a few statements. The implementation seems to be far from mature, debugging tools are virtually absent. (I once heard that OO would support VBA, hopefully that once comes true)

The bottom line is that many times I use a combination of Calc, bash, awk, bc and gnuplot for scientific work.

This all does not apply to the Writer sibling of OO. Writer is uncomparable with the level of Calc, and to be preferred over MsWord.

jlinkels

1. OpenOffice Calc (spreadsheet) is the equal to Excel, and sometimes better, in all areas except making charts/graphing. At that, it fails miserably.

2. There are add-ons for Calc that might help. Post your query at openoffice.org and see what they suggest.

3. As for presentation slides, check out OpenOffice Impress. It handles Microsoft Powerpoint files, and people go back and forth in terms of which clipart is better, etc.

4. OpenOffice Writer (word processor) will handle your dissertation with no problem whatsoever.