StarOffice Calc v. MS Excel: - SVN

StarOffice Calc Usability Evaluation
selected the formula, clicked “OK,” and then were surprised when the formula didn’t appear in the
spreadsheet.
Figure 3.
StarOffice Calc Function Dialog Box
After selecting the desired formula, users were presented with the view shown in Figure 3.
Participants did not immediately understand what to put in each box; it took trial and error to create
the correct function with the correct data range.
Recommended Design Change
StarOffice Calc needs a cleaner AutoPilot dialog box that is more intuitive to users. A complete
redesign of the box is out of scope of this study; the box should be designed iteratively and shown
to users after each revision. Also, it should be tested more comprehensively than we were able to,
i.e. by having participants add multiple complex formulas to a document.
Stage 3 – Advanced Formatting
In Stage 3, participants were asked to add advanced formatting to a financial spreadsheet. The
stage consisted of four individual tasks, detailed in Figure 4 below.
Tasks 9-11 follow the general pattern we have observed in the task data; StarOffice Calc tasks were
ranked an average of 7.0% more difficult than Excel tasks, though a t-test indicated the overall
difference between Excel and StarOffice Calc was not significant.
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