I can understand that. I'm not a big Microsoft fan myself, but there is no denying that Excel is one powerful program and relatively bug free.

According to hubby, there is something called StarOffice made by Sun which he thinks has most of the functionality of Excel but is based on OpenOffice. You might want to have look at that.

If you do decide to write your own - your challenge is to do it in as few lines of code as possible with no redundant loops.