TW Blog :: Archives for June 2004

Renewal Dates In OO Calc

Relates to Open Source and The Office

One of my many goals the past few weeks has been improving the automation of my office environment. A little example is the management of renewal dates and years of service for database records. There are enough features in Open Office to just enter the registration date for a new record and leave the rest to the system. The solutions I came up with are:

cell_service_yrs  = CEILING(YEARFRAC(cell_register_date;TODAY());1)
cell_renewal_date = DATE(YEAR(cell_register_date)+cell_service_yrs;MONTH(cell_register_date);DAY(cell_register_date))

Perhaps this is the same set of date functions available in Excel? I never really got to play with them before migrating to Open Office.

Ideally I would like to create a set of UDFs as an add-in module for the global library using Basic that could be plugged into this and other spreadsheets. Unfortunately there has not been the time to explore Open Office Basic yet! Here are some links if you are venturing down that path (and for my own future reference).

• Andrew Pitonyak's Macro Collection. Contains comprehensive information on OO Basic
• OpenOffice.org External Resources
• OOO Macros for Open Office
• Star Office Basic Manual 212 pages (PDF at 763KB)

Posted on Sunday, Jun 20, 2004 at 03:37:22.