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.

This is another article in my series that shows the similarities between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office (pre-Office 2007. Using a new product requires some re-learning. That’s unavoidable. But you rarely have to learn an entirely new set of skills—it’s just that the new stuff sticks out at us.

In a blog entry posted yesterday, developer Kohei Yoshida expresses his frustration with Sun's excessively bureaucratic specification process and unwillingness to compromise and communicate with members of the community. Yoshida invested a tremendous amount of personal time developing a sophisticated optimization solver module for the OpenOffice.org Calc program.