How to Design Open Office Spreadsheets

Use Open Office to create your own spreadsheets.

The Open Office program provides many of the same capabilities as the Microsoft Office suite of products, and this product is very popular with home users who need a solid spreadsheet and word processing program. Open Office program is completely free to use. It is very useful, and users can design spreadsheets and other documents quickly and easily.

Things You'll Need

• Computer
• Open Office
• Spreadsheet templates

Instructions

1. Log on to your computer and open the Open Office program. Click on the "Start" button, choose "All Programs" and look for the "Open Office.org" entry. Click on "Open Office Calc" to open the spreadsheeet program. Click on the "File" menu, choose "New" and then "Spreadsheet." Save the new spreadsheet to your hard drive or network share file.

2. Go to the Open Office website and download several templates for the spreadsheets you plan to create. Open Office provides templates for a number of widely used spreadsheet applications, including invoice forms, inventory lists and budgets.

3. Apply the appropriate template to the spreadsheet you have saved, then replace the generic text from the template with your own words and formulas. Continue to change the content of the spreadsheet as you go, and make any formatting changes you wish. Highlight a cell and click the icons on the formatting toolbar to change the format of a cell. This is the third toolbar down on the screen, and it includes icons for bolding, italics and other formatting options.

References

• Open Office: Templates