is there a way to export a spread sheet to open office rather than excel? the reason is not all users have access to excel and since open office is free if i could export my graphs to that it would work much nicer for me.
The purpose, as you indicated, of openoffice is for people who do not have Excel. However OpenOffice is equiped to open Excel files same way as Adobe Reader. You don't need Adobe on your machine. If you have a xls file on your machine and double click on it it will open up in OpenOffice. So in conclusion you need to have an Excel file to open in the first place.