LibreOffice: Spreadsheets

Whether you’re puzzling out pivot tables or building bar charts, Bobby Moss is determined to make you a cell-wrangling ninja.

- Bobby Moss

Whether you’re tracking your finances, your game collection or the progress of your favourite sports team, spreadsheets are a ridiculously useful tool to have in your computing arsenal. Since the invention of VisiCalc and the rise of Microsoft Excel, these powerful tools have matured to include a whole host of features, most recently those we’d typically see in word processing applications like automatic formatting wizards and tools to generate attractive-looking reports.

We last covered spreadsheets back in LXF140, which was long before LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org, its parent project. We opted for the former over the latter on the grounds that it’s now bundled by default with most mainstream Linux distros, and is arguably better-maintained.

In theory, you could use this tutorial for either package, but LibreOffice’s user interface has changed dramatically since version 5 and it now uses Extended ODF as its file format by default, so OpenOffice.org users may find their mileage varies.

Here we’ll cover the bare basics of how to use LibreOffice spreadsheets, then move through ways to automate data entry, generate pivot tables and create attractive-looking charts. It may not be as exciting as spinning up your own cloud storage service in AWS (that’s next month), but hopefully these tips will help you reclaim some leisure time.

Off the grid

The first thing you’ll see when you open up LibreOffice’s

Calc module is a giant grid with letters across the top and numbers down the side. Excel and Gnumeric users will feel perfectly at home: much like those packages. if you select a cell you should see the address for it highlighted towards the top-left of the screen.