I have a question in a similar vein; apologies for the hijack.
I'm using an older version of Excel that can't handle the depth of function calls in the SSF spreadsheet.
I do, however, also have OpenOffice which can open the spreadsheet (it takes about 10 minutes to convert), so I was wondering if anybody has had success with using it that way? I'm a bit hesitant to go in blind, since my old 2E universe generator (Excel v4 vintage) did
NOT work well when I tried to let OpenOffice convert it several years ago.