Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

LibreOffice Calc

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Development status
  
Active

Type
  
Spreadsheet

LibreOffice Calc

Developer(s)
  
The Document Foundation

Stable release
  
"Fresh" version: 5.3.1 (16 March 2017; 1 day ago (2017-03-16)) [±] "Still" version: 5.2.6 (9 March 2017; 8 days ago (2017-03-09)) [±]

Operating system
  
Linux, OS X, Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD

License
  
MPLv2.0 (secondary license GPL, LGPLv3+ or Apache License 2.0)

LibreOffice Calc is the spreadsheet component of the LibreOffice software package.

Contents

After forking from OpenOffice.org in 2010, LibreOffice Calc underwent a massive re-work of external reference handling to fix a large number of defects in formula calculations involving external references, and to boost data caching performance especially when referencing large data ranges.

Additionally Calc now supports 1 million rows in a spreadsheet with macro references to each cell.

Calc is capable of opening and saving most spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel file format. Calc is also capable of saving spreadsheets as PDF files.

As with the entire LibreOffice suite, Calc is available for a variety of platforms, including Linux, OS X, Microsoft Windows, and FreeBSD. Available under the Mozilla Public License, Calc is free and open source software.

Features

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.
  • Supports 1 million rows in a spreadsheet, making LibreOffice spreadsheets more suitable for heavier scientific or financial spreadsheets. However, the number of columns is restricted to at most 1024, much lower than Excel's limit of 16384.

    • In its internal data structure, Calc until version 4.1 relies on cells as the base class throughout, which has been blamed for "extreme memory use, slow computation, and difficult code". Version 4.2 (released in January 2014) addresses these issues by instead storing the data in arrays where possible.

    Pivot Table

    Originally called DataPilot, Pivot Table provides similar functionality to the Pivot table found in Microsoft Excel. It is used for interactive table layout and dynamic data analysis.

    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.

    An advanced sort macro is included that allows data to be arranged or categorised based on either a user generated macro or one of several default included macros.

    Release history

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

    Versions for LibreOffice Calc include the following:

    References

    LibreOffice Calc Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA