LibreOffice Calc is the spreadsheet

Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a computer application that simulates a paper accounting worksheet. It displays multiple cells usually in a two-dimensional matrix or grid consisting of rows and columns. Each cell contains alphanumeric text, numeric values or formulas...

 component of the LibreOffice

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite developed by The Document Foundation as a fork of OpenOffice.org. It is largely compatible with other major office suites, including Microsoft Office, and available on a variety of platforms...

 software package.

Since forking from OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...

 LibreOffice Calc has been modified with longstanding bugs addressed and sought-after features beginning to be added in. An example is Calc's new ability to support 1 million rows in a spreadsheet with macro references to each cell.

Calc is similar to Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...

, with a roughly equivalent range of features. Calc is capable of opening and saving most spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel file format. It provides a number of features not present in Excel, including a system that automatically defines series for graphing based on the layout of the user's data. Calc is also capable of saving spreadsheets as PDF files.

The default file format

File format

A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file.Since a disk drive, or indeed any computer storage, can store only bits, the computer must have some way of converting information to 0s and 1s and vice-versa. There are different kinds of formats for...

 for LibreOffice Calc can be set to either Microsoft Excel's native file format or the international standard OpenDocument Format

OpenDocument

The Open Document Format for Office Applications is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents....

 (ODF) ISO

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

/IEC

International Electrotechnical Commission

The International Electrotechnical Commission is a non-profit, non-governmental international standards organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies – collectively known as "electrotechnology"...

 26300:2006. Calc also supports a wide range of other file formats, for both opening and saving files, such as CSV

CSV

CSV may refer to:* Clerics of Saint Viator* Common Stored Value Ticket* Confederación Sudamericana de Voleibol* Character Strengths and Virtues* Christian Social People's Party* Community Service Volunteers...

, HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

, SXC, DBF

DBASE

dBase II was the first widely used database management system for microcomputers. It was originally published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on ported to the Apple II and IBM PC under DOS...

, DIF

Data Interchange Format

Data Interchange Format is a text file format used to import/export single spreadsheets between spreadsheet programs . It is also known as "Navy DIF"...

, UOF

Uniform Office Format

Uniform Office Format sometimes known as Unified Office Format is an open standard for 'office' applications developed in China. It includes word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet modules, and is made up of GUI, API, and format specifications...

, SLK

SYmbolic LinK (SYLK)

Symbolic Link is a Microsoft file format typically used to exchange data between applications, specifically spreadsheets. SYLK files conventionally have a .slk suffix. Composed of only displayable ANSI characters, it can be easily created and processed by other applications, such as...

, SDC

StarOffice

StarOffice, known briefly as Oracle Open Office before its discontinuation in 2010, is a proprietary office suite. It was originally developed by StarDivision which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999...

 and others.

As with the entire LibreOffice suite, Calc is available for a variety of platforms, including Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

, Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

, Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, Available under the GNU Lesser General Public License

GNU Lesser General Public License

The GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation . It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License...

, Calc is free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

.

Special capabilities

Capabilities of Calc include:

• Ability to read/write OpenDocument (ODF), Excel (XLS), CSV and several other formats.
• Support for a large number of functions, including those for imaginary numbers, as well as financial and statistical functions.
• Additional capabilities are easily added as extensions, which includes such capabilities as being able to call functions from the R statistical package, calculations based upon textual representations of number, database access, and use of external BI tools

Pivot Table

Originally called DataPilot, Pivot Table provides similar functionality to the Pivot table

Pivot table

In data processing, a pivot table is a data summarization tool found in data visualization programs such as spreadsheets or business intelligence software. Among other functions, pivot-table tools can automatically sort, count, total or give the average of the data stored in one table or spreadsheet...

 found in Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...

. It is used for interactive table layout and dynamic data analysis.

As of LibreOffice 3.4, Pivot table has support for an unlimited number of fields. Previously Pivot Table only supported up to 8 column/row/data fields and up to 10 page fields.

As of LibreOffice 3.3 an advanced sort macro has been added that allows data to be arranged or categorised based on either a user generated macro or one of several default included macros.

Versions

Calc has continued to diverged since the fork from its parent OpenOffice with new features being added and code cleanups taking place.

Versions for LibreOffice Calc include the following:

Year Released	Version	Comments
2011-06-16	3.3.3	More-familiar default key bindings. Toolbar icon for toggling sheet grids in Calc similar to excel. Improved Excel interoperability. Documents drawn with the UNO api can be inserted in calc. Setting an external fourier reference works within OFFSET function now New options for CSV (Comma-Separated Value) importation in Calc, allowing the import of custom delimited files common in engineering scenarios. Support for 3 different formula syntaxes: Calc A1, Excel A1 and Excel R1C1. 1 million rows in a spreadsheet in Calc making Calc more suitable for heavier scientific or financial spreadsheets.
2011-06-03	3.4.0	Redesigned Move/Copy Sheet dialog (Edit->Sheet->Move/Copy) to improve its ergonomics. Support for autofilter per sheet: It is now possible to set autofilter per sheet without manually creating named database ranges prior to setting autofilter. Previously Calc only supported one autofilter per document, which caused the previous autofilter to disappear when setting another one even on a different sheet unless a named database range was created beforehand. Re-work of the drawing layer, to improve precision on re-positioning and re-sizing of drawing objects. When a spreadsheet is encrypted with a password, you can now change the password while the document is open, from File->Properties->General->Change Password. The button is enabled only when the document is encrypted with a password. Support for unlimited number of fields: Previously DataPilot only supported up to 8 column/row/data fields and up to 10 page fields. 3.4 has lifted this restriction to allow unlimited number of fields in each field type. The internal implementation of DataPilot has been significantly re-worked in order to fix several regressions especially with regard to refreshing of DataPilot tables. Named range as data source: With 3.4 it is now possible to use a named range as the data source for DataPilot. This allows, for example, addition of new rows to the data source and update of the DataPilot table to reflect the new data, without manually changing the data source range in the DataPilot dialog. Previously, Calc only supported named ranges in global scope, that is, all named ranges were made available for the entire document regardless of the current sheet. In 3.4 Calc now supports named ranges that are local to a sheet. The named range dialog (Insert->Names->Define) has been modified to reflect this change. Now preserves OLE links to other Excel documents when importing an Excel document. OLE links get converted to external references upon import. *Previously, Calc ignored OLE links and cells containing OLE links resulted in error upon import. Multiple subtotals on a single sheet: It is now possible to define more than one subtotal range in a single sheet via Data->Subtotals. Previously, setting a second subtotal range removed the first one if they were on the same sheet.

See also

• List of spreadsheets
• Comparison of spreadsheets

External links

• LibreOffice Spreadsheet Project
• Spreadsheet FAQ
• Official LibreOffice Documentation Wiki. Select any of the Calc sections
• CalcLink (a bi-directional link between Calc and Mathematica)