What would you say if I asked you to name the thing that had the greatest impact on Western Society in the second half of the 20th Century? Chances are you'd say the PC—the ubiquitous Personal Computer. But that's only half the story; it wasn't the PCs themselves that caused the revolution. After all, I got my first PC, a Sinclair ZX 81 back in 1981, and although it made an interesting hobby, it certainly wasn't life changing.
By the end of the 80's I was using something that anyone today would recognize as looking like a PC, but it was still very primitive. Apart from running a word processor called Lex-WP, it was really just an interface to VAX and Unix servers.
So, what was it that turned the PC from just a useful tool into the essential, number one requirement for any business? One answer is Excel—we can even put a date to the start of this revolution—November 1987.
After starting life as Multiplan, Excel became available to everyone who was running Microsoft Windows (and who had the money). Overnight, virtually every major business became addicted to the software; and Microsoft became the giant that we know and love today.
It's not really a surprise that Excel was so successful. It was an application with which you could organize your information to analyze and manipulate your data. You could even extend the basic functionality by using macros.
And that's pretty well how things remained for the rest of the century.
However, things were about to change.
In January 1998, a new term was introduced in a meeting at Palo Alto in California—open source. Then in 2000, Sun Microsystems informed the world that they were going to join the open‑source community; so on 13th October, 2000, OpenOffice.org was born.
Today, the realm of the professional spreadsheet is not just limited to those that can afford it. Today even the smallest business or individual user can use Calc, and (as we'll see in this book) we can take the basic application and bend it to our own will.
Now that's a revolution.
Chapter 1 introduces you to the tools that you'll need in order to write your own macros. By the end of the chapter you'll have become acclimatized to Calc's development environment, and you'll know which buttons to press to make your life a little bit easier.
Chapter 2 starts to make use of the basic building blocks that you'll need for your macros: Libraries, Modules, Subroutines, and Functions. By the end of the chapter you'll have your first macro up and running.
Chapter 3 gives an overview of the objects that are built into Calc, and which we can make use of in order to create macros that perform quite complex operations; we'll see just how easy they are to use. We'll also see where to get further information on these objects.
Chapter 4 is where we really get into writing macros. Here you'll learn how to manipulate the contents of one (or more) spreadsheets—and after all, that's what we're here for, isn't it?
Chapter 5 looks at how we can format the data contained in our spreadsheet—it doesn't matter how accurate our data is, if all of the columns overlap each other making the contents impossible to read.
Chapter 6 is an introduction to databases—how to access them, how to display the results of queries in a spreadsheet, and how to change the contents of the databases themselves.
Chapter 7 explains how to make use of other documents (such as charts) within Calc, and how they can be sources of information; for instance, the contents of websites.
Chapter 8 moves away from purely writing code, and shows how you can build a user interface—by building your own dialogs.
Chapter 9 brings everything together. By the end of the chapter you'll be able to create and distribute a complete application.
Chapter 10 takes a look into the future of Calc, and what to do if you're moving from Excel to Calc but don't want to have to rewrite all of your code.
You don’t need to be a programmer to use this book, but you do need to be familiar with the concept of a program and how simple things like a loop might work. The book is compatible with StarBasic, the macro language for commercial version of OOo—StarOffice.
As you progress through the book, you'll find that some of the issues we deal with only relate to the most current versions of OOo. At the time of writing, all of the code in Chapters 2-9 works for version 2.0.4 on Windows and 2.0.2 on Linux. Chapter 10 is another story—that really is on the cutting edge, and for that you'll need Novell's version of OpenOffice.org.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "Don't forget that Main must be the first macro in the module."
A block of code will be set as follows:
Dim fname as String Dim sname as String Dim username as String
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:
Sub click_cmd_view_symbols
Dim oTxt_company as Object
Dim oLstCompanySymbol as Object
oTxt_company = oFinance_dialog.getControl("txt_company")
oLstCompanySymbol = oFinance_dialog.getControl("lstCompanySymbol")
oLstCompanySymbol.AddItem( oTxt_company.Text ,0)
End Sub
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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