Once you protect a sheet, if you try to modify the content of the cells, it will give the message “Protected cells cannot be modified” 5. The following shows the protect sheet dialogue. You can protect the current sheet of the whole document, by clicking on Menu -> Tools -> Protect Document -> Sheet (or Document). Once you’ve created the list of value, click on any cell in this column, which will show the drop-down list with the values you just created as shown below. In the Entries text box, enter the list of values that you want to be created as part of the list of values. From “Criteria” tab, select “List” in the drop-down for “Allow”. To create list of values based on the data from the columns, select the column, click on Menu -> Data -> Validity. To use this, click on Menu -> Format -> Conditional Formatting. You can also combine multiple conditions using OR/AND conditions. For example, if the cell value is “Technology”, you can set a custom background, and font to the cell or row. Using conditional formatting, you can format a specific cell or row only based on a certain condition. Select the table in the spreadsheet, and click on Menu -> Format -> Autoformat. Instead of manually formatting your tables with different font colors and background, you can use one of the builtin table autoformat as shown below. The following is the list of some Openoffice calc spreadsheet tips and tricks. OpenOffice Calc offers pretty much most of the functionalities that are in Microsoft Excel.

On Windows, instead of spending money on Microsoft Office, download and use Openoffice. On Ubuntu, OpenOffice is the default office suite. OpenOffice works on both Linux and Windows.

Open office spreadsheet