Openoffice
We usually have a fairly recent version of openoffice.org installed for Linux.
In the past we also installed it for MacOSX but lack of interest means that it has been dropped. Let us know if you want it on any OSX machine(s).
The command to start openoffice.org is openoffice, and it also appears on the default Gnome menus.
Printing Excel spreadsheets
Sometimes when openoffice reads in an Excel-created spreadsheet, a large number of extraneous page breaks are introduced by the conversion process. This becomes evident when you attempt to print the spreadsheet: what appears on screen as a single (or a few) pages of reasonably sized text becomes, when printed, many pages of unreadably small text bunched up into the corner of the page! To fix this, select the Page Break Preview mode from the View menu and you will see the extraneous page breaks, which can then be removed by dragging them to an edge of the page. See also Format/Print Ranges for the definition of print ranges which control which parts of a spreadsheet are printed. Select Remove to get rid of any existing ranges and start over if necessary. See Format/Page/Page for general page settings and Format/Page/Sheet for the scaling mode selection.