TechTarget Article: Using OpenOffice Calc Spreadsheet Scenarios With Different Variables

I've written an article on how to use the Scenario feature in OpenOffice.org or StarOffice Calc.

http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid39_gci1191742,00.html

This is what scenarios look like.

Here's the intro, i.e. what scenarios are and why you'd use them. They're pretty slick.

I've been there. We've all been there. You're sitting there in the third hour of a boring meeting, nibbling on the last doughnut and trying to figure out what your income and expenses would have to be to move to a small island in British Columbia and support yourself with your macrame skills. Or you're giving a presentation to the director and a couple veeps and one of them just asked you, "OK, I like those numbers, but what if we sold the routers for $20,000 and outsourced all the work to Budapest?"

The common thread here is multiple scenarios. You want to see the effect of different values for the items that affect your bottom line: gross income, expenses, macrame yarn costs (buying in bulk saves you a lot of money), etc.

You can copy and paste, retyping the values each time, or you can tell your director that you'll, um, get back to her this afternoon. But the clever, slick, timesaving approach is to use the OpenOffice.org Calc scenarios feature.