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There is a macro that does Text to Columns in Calc

http://www.ooomacros.org/user.php

Microsoft macro support in Open office is far from optimal. However, there are a whole slew of Open Office-centric macros to choose from which could meet your needs.

you've got machines with RAM to spare

you're not going to need support,

you're not going to need the pre-written macro code which is everywhere for Office,

you don't need the excellent VBA IDE,

you don't need the excellent documentation,

you're not going to use the entire systems implemented in Office (Excel and Access systems are commonplace where I work, they're commercial and not in-house software),

you don't mind not being able to properly use the documents everyone outside your organisation will be using, and the documents your employees will be bringing from home,

you don't mind the GUI not matching the rest of your system,

you don't mind using a piece of software which no-one will have audited,

you can't wait for Office 2007 for ODF,

and you don't need a rich macro API.

If only Calc had built-in histogram capability. I was able to find a macro to do the job), but it becomes a little clunky when one has reams and reams of data (as bioinformatics are likely to produce). Certainly I realize that OOo isn't meant for hard-core statistics. But it's often nice to do these kinds of little tests to know if a trend is worth rigorously following up.

The one missing piece, however, is an automated program to silently convert .DOC and other input formats to ODT. This could be done with an OOo macro. An example is given here: http://www.ooomacros.org/user.php#95532. The macro simply opens the specified files and saves then as PDF. If you alter the macro to save as ODT and remove or archive the original, you have the functionality you need.

Hope it helps.

OpenOffice.org already has OOBasic which is the Visual Basic language, but with a different object model. So, what is lacking is a compatibility layer for Microsoft documents.

Have a look to OOoMacros.org and the french OOo sub-projectfor interesting native OOo macros.

http://www.ooomacros.org/

Yes,, the macro. MUCH better control than the built-in exporter.

Is Ability open source? (OOo is, SO is not.)

OpenOffice.org is well known, has third party books available, and third party training. If you want a commercial counterpart, there is StarOffice. Seems to me like the best of both worlds.

There is one major feature of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice that don't seem to get as much play as they should in a forum like Slashdot. It is programmable in Basic, Java, Python. If you install the scripting framework then is is programmable in BeanShell (i.e. interactive Java), JavaScript, and others in the future.

The OOo document format is well documented . XML in a Zip file. The DTD is available. KDE has announced that KOffice will be standardizing on the OpenOffice.org document format. So in theory, a Windows user running SO or OOo could exchange documents with a Linux user running KOffice. (Not that both OOo and SO don't also run on Linux.)

Developer documentation is readily available, and also a large downloadable SDK. Third parties can develop new components that run within and seemlessly integrate into OOo or SO.

There are lots of resources for OOo.
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This is by no means an exhaustive list.

I have personally taken an interest in OOo and written a Java program (and other tools ) The java program draws Mazes on a running copy of OOo, but the java program can be run on a different computer, over the net. (Win -> Linux, Linux -> Win, etc.)