Calc Add-on help

[Raeden]

Hey guys, Here's the scenario:

I am currently taking a business statistics course and my teacher said that we will be using Microsoft Excel 2007 extensively throughout the course but I don't want to buy office 2007 when I could just use OpenOffice.org for free.

So my question is:

In Excel 2007 there is an add-in called analysis toolpak which allows one to do 'descriptive statistics'. Is there a same (or similar) add-on for openoffice.org?

Thank you.

[FJCC]

OpenOffice.org is relatively weak in analysis functions compared to the Excel Analysis Toolpak. I suggest you find out just what topics will be covered in the course and see if OOo will do the job. OOo certainly has the basic stuff for statistics but lacks, for example, ANOVA analysis. There are more powerful, and free, statistics packages available, though you would have to check on the compatibility with Vista.

[Cambirder]

If you are being asked to use Excel purely for the toolpak stats package, then I would say use Gnumeric rather than Calc, as it has a built in stats package very similar to toolpak that is very easy to use and the output is almost identical to toolpak's (the only real difference is that Gnumeric give an accuracy to 14 decimal places).

You really need to check that you are not going to have to use spreadsheet tools that are full of VBA macros as that may force you down the Excel route, as happened with me last year where I needed to run a environmental modeling spreadsheet that would run on nothing but Excel. If you do have to do this you may be able to obtain the real cheap "Ultimate steal" package which I did last year so I have a 100% legit version of MSO 2007 Ultimate which cost me £39.

[jrkrideau]

Hey guys, Here's the scenario:

I am currently taking a business statistics course and my teacher said that we will be using Microsoft Excel 2007 extensively throughout the course but I don't want to buy office 2007 when I could just use OpenOffice.org for free.

So my question is:

In Excel 2007 there is an add-in called analysis toolpak which allows one to do 'descriptive statistics'. Is there a same (or similar) add-on for openoffice.org?

Thank you.

If you need to use a spreadsheet for a stats course then I suspect that Cambirder's sugTgestion of Gnumeric makes a lot of sense. There are a number of stats packages available see https://www.msu.edu/~olsonluk/openSource/OSSMath.htm for some suggestions that you might want to use if you are not limited to a spreadsheet.

here is one OOo extension called R4Calc - R Statistics for OOoCalc that apparently allows you to run at least some of the stats program R from within Calc. I use R and I use Calc but I've never used them in combination before. I loaded R4Calc and managed to get it to give me a boxplot and a historgram so we're already one up on Calc or Excel, at least without the Analysis Toolpak. Other than that I know nothing about it.

[wagafo]

This may be a little late, but take a look at ODStatistics, http://sourceforge.net/projects/odstatistics/ , a package with various spreadsheets in descriptive statistics at the undergraduate level.