Book Image

Learn OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Macro Programming: OOoBasic and Calc automation

By : Dr Mark Alexander Bain
Book Image

Learn OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Macro Programming: OOoBasic and Calc automation

By: Dr Mark Alexander Bain

Overview of this book

<p>Adding macros to your spreadsheets enables you to add data processing features to your work, automate repetitive tasks, and even create complete data-driven programs that use the spreadsheet as their back end.<br /><br />This book teaches the OOoBasic language and the Calc object model, so that you can manipulate spreadsheets and data from within your programs. You will also see how to create dialog boxes and windows for friendly user interfaces, and how to integrate your spreadsheets with other applications, for example writing spreadsheet data to a document, or capturing data from a database, and using the spreadsheet for generating advanced calculations and reports.<br /><br />Calc is OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet module. Like the rest of OpenOffice.org Calc can be programmed using the built-in language OOoBasic. Both simple macros and complex applications can be developed in this language by controlling Calc through its object model. The book is compatible with the commercial version of OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and the StarBasic language.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Learn OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Macro Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Getting more Information


You'll have noticed that we've not gone into a great amount of detail here. For instance:

  • We've seen how to declare variables, but not what the different variable types are.

  • We've seen the functions lcase, mid, and msgbox in action, but there are no technical details on them.

Quite simply, we haven't got enough room here to discuss all of the functionality that is built into OOo and that's available to us. Fortunately, the IDE has all the information that you require. If you need to know more, then highlight a keyword (for example, Dim or msgbox) in the Basic Editor, and then press F1. You will see a screen similar to the following screenshot:

You'll find that there is a complete listing of all of the OOo Basic functions that you can use in your macros.