July 16, 2009, 8:51 am
If you’re coming fresh from Microsoft Excel, you might wonder where the Pivot tables are in OpenOffice.org Calc. The problem is, they’re masquerading under the name of DataPilots. But, under any name, DataPilots are Calc’s way of allowing you to quickly reorganize information in a range of cells so that you can gain a new insight into them. In a way, you could think of them as the spreadsheet equivalent of queries in databases. They aren’t difficult to create, but they do take a little bit of thought to set up correctly.
A DataPilot requires a range of cells as a source. However, to work properly, the range must be organized as it would be in a database, with labels at the top of each column. For example, if you are a college instructor, you might have created a spreadsheet for entering grades…
