Open Office is one of the best open source alternatives to Microsoft Office. For those who are still in love with the traditional drop down menu in MS Office 97 and before, Open Office is definitely a solid choice for word processing, spreadsheets and presentation.
Somehow I’m still not getting the feel of those big awful navigation icons came into vogue post MS Office 97. Somewhere in the mid to late 1990s, Microsoft probably lost its plot and packed a whole lot of useless features into Office at the expense of simplicity and user friendliness.
When using Open Office Spreadsheet recently, I was trying to copy a data table from the Docs to Calc. After trying for more than half an hour, I became frustrated. From the traditional Copy and Paste, I tried all sorts of other Paste Special methods but without success.
I couldn’t believe that it was unable to perform such a seemingly simple task!
So after tearing my hair out for more than half an hour, the solution finally came.
So this is how it goes:
1. In Open Office Calc, highlight the cells you want to copy.
2. Control C to copy the range.
3. Shift + Control + V to Paste Special
4. Paste as Unformatted Text in Open Office Docs
5. Then Ctrl+A to select all the data
6. Go to Table – Convert -Text to Table
7. In “Separate text at”, set to “Tabs” and click OK
Voila! Really so simple!
I have been using this software for years. Personally it has 95% of what I will ever need in an office software suite. One of the top free products out there.
Download Open Office >>
Tip: Another free open source office suite is Libre Office. It is a bit more feature packed and powerful than Open Office but I find it slightly less user friendly. Like Open Office, a big plus is the good old fashion Drop Down menu. Download Libre Office >>
So why pay a dime for your Office Suite software?