If you are an IT specialist or an accountant, you may need the services of a suite that has a spreadsheet format. The most commonly used service provider for this is Microsoft with their renowned Microsoft Excel. However, other players have entered the market and provided similar products such as Apache Open Office with their OpenOffice Calculator and Document Foundation’s LibreOffice. There are five main reasons why you should stick with Microsoft Excel over Open Office Calculator.
Variety of viewing Options
Microsoft Excel has a wider variety of document viewing options in comparison to Open Office Calculator. One of the most commonly used options is the diagram creation tool. This ensures that you have a better experience and can play around with the document colours and features to provide a more personalized feel in your end product.
In-built grammar checker
One of its biggest advantages that Microsoft Excel has over Open Office Calculator is that it has a built-in grammar-checking tool that ensures that your document is error-free and flows. Open Office Calculator on the other hand requires you to activate an add-on feature in order to check grammar as you work on your document. This may cost you more money and is likely to fail in some instances.
User-friendly interface
Open Office Calculator uses a single document interface thus each document will have its own window where you can only view one document at a time. However, Microsoft Excel has a multiple document interface with one parent window but numerous documents can be viewed at the same time.
Lower Risk of Security Breaches
Microsoft Excel has a strong built-in firewall that comes along with the package upon purchase that reduces the chances of security breaches. On the other hand, Open Office calculator is open and has a higher chance of security risks such as bugs added to the code by malicious users during development.
Interest of the End User
Unlike Microsoft Office which is proprietary, people download OpenOffice for free use and unrestricted modification without any payment. This translates into the higher concentration of the interest of the end user by the Microsoft Excel as opposed to the developer’s interest as done by Open Office Calculator.
Conclusion
If you already use spreadsheets, it is quite obvious that Microsoft Excel would be a better option in comparison to Open Office Calculator for the above reasons. You should look into other options and make a choice depending on personal preference. In spite of the obvious cost of owning the Microsoft Suite, the program has superior features.
