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LibreOffice Calc

Calc has been around before Sun Microsystems released the first version of OpenOffice.org in 2000. The founders of the Document Foundation forked it with the rest of the applications that now compose LibreOffice.

Page Contents

About Calc

Simple for beginners and students, but feature rich for accountants, scientists, and number and data crunchers from a variety of other professions is Calc. It has multiple user interfaces and runs on multiple pllatforms.

User Interface

Calc has 11 or 12 menus (12 for Mac),  toolbars, a sidebar, and context menus to access features and settings. On this page there are introductions to menus, toolbars, the sidebar, and context menus.

Calc vs Excel

Excel is used in just about every office in the world, and it is considered the gold standard of spreadsheet. Calc, however, has several features and capabilities the golden boy doesn't. The opposite is also true.

About Calc

Calc was one of the first applications in StarOffice. It was added to version 2.0 in 1994. It has always had features and capabilities that have been comparable to the latest versions of Excel. Since version 3.1, it has been available on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux operating systems.

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The application has always had menu items across the top, and it always had  various toolbars.

User Interface

Calc has 12 menu items available for Mac users, while Windows and Linux distros make 11 available to users. Mac users have a LibreOffice menu, in addition to the 11 regular menus.

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Menus

Menus gives users access to all the settings, controls, and dialogs available in the application. They are as follows: 

  • LibreOffice (Mac only)

  • File

  • Edit

  • View

  • Insert

  • Format

  • Styles

  • Sheet

  • Data

  • Tools

  • Windows

  • Help

Toolbars

Like the other applications, Calc has a Standard toolbar and a Formatting toolbar that items can be added to and removed from. Both have icons that perform various features.

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In addition to these two toolbars, there are several others that are designed specifically for Calc, such as Insert Cell. Several of the toolbars are available in the other applications, such as Find and Drawing Object Properties, are available in other applications, but have uniques features in Calc.

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The toolbars offer quick access to items and settings that can modify a spreadsheet.

Sidebar

The sidebar, located at the right side of the spreadsheet window, has five tabs that, like the toolbars, offer quick access to items and settings. The sections are:

  • Properties

  • Styles

  • Gallery

  • Navigator

  • Functions

Modern Digital Watch

Context menus

Cells, text in cells, columns, rows, images, charts, and other elements in a Calc spreadsheet all have context menus. The collective items in each menu differ from menu to menu. Many of the items are common in the several different menus.

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Right-clicking an element launches the corresponding context menu. There are top-level items in each menu, as well as sub-menus.

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Here are the different context menus:

  • Cell

  • Text

  • Row

  • Column

  • Image

  • Chart

Calc vs Excel

Excel is the industry standard for spreadsheets, and every other spreadsheet application has to support its formats to stay relevant. Calc supports them and many others, both current formats and legacy ones. Support for many formats is one of the many advantages Calc has over Excel. Others include supporting more formats, being able to have more rows, and xxxx

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