There are many ways to enter data into spreadsheet. The simplest way is just to click a cell and type. You'll notice as you type characters into a cell that they also appear in an input box near the top of the screen.

When you're done, you can click the check mark icon next to the input box or you can exit the cell to apply the changes you've made.

If you don't want to save the changes, click the cancel icon and the cell will revert to its previous state.

We'll enter a few more values to use as column titles for our list.

If you’ve enabled autospellcheck the data you enter will be spell-checked as you type. Misspelled words will be underlined with a wavy red line. Right click on the misspelled word to see suggestions for correcting the word.

If you want to turn autospellcheck on or off, you can select spellcheck from the tools menu and click on the autospellcheck menu item.

Let's enter some more information so you can see some of the other data entry features of Calc. There are lots of other ways to input data into a cell besides typing it in.

You can drag characters from one cell to another cell. Just select the characters you want to copy then drag them to the new cell.

You can copy almost anything in the spreadsheet by selecting it and selecting copy from the edit menu. You can paste it by clicking where you want to insert the cell and clicking paste. Copying and pasting is a quick and simple way to move items between spreadsheet files, worksheets and in many cases between different applications.

Often when you are building a list in a spreadsheet, you will enter the same column values over and over again. As you start to enter values into a column, OpenOffice will try to guess what you are typing based on other values in the column. If Calc guesses right, you can hit the enter key or move to the next cell. OpenOffice will automatically fill in the remaining characters for you.

There are several other ways to enter values into Calc. You can import values from other spreadsheets or files. You can connect to a database, or you can even pull certain items from a web page directly into your spreadsheet. We'll cover these items in other modules.

When we have entered all of the values into our sample spreadsheet it will look like this.