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Gnumeric 1.0 Has Arrived
plastercast writes: "Gnumeric 1.0 is now out, which makes the Gnome desktop even more 1.0-tastic, with the recent milestones of Galeon and Evolution. ... For those that do not know, Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program with the ability to include all sorts of neat bonobo objects, and also can create graphs through guppi, the Gnome graping program. Enjoy!" Update: 12/31 20:08 GMT by T : That's "graphing." Graping is for the stroke of twelve. Update: 12/31 21:01 GMT by T : Jody Goldberg writes "You folks posted the story a touch too quickly. The release announcement just went out 5 minutes ago."
That depends on what version you were using before. :-)
Frankly, if it was 'long ago' then gnumeric is well overdue for another look. Test it out on that troublesome spreadsheet and judge for yourself.
I've followed it on-and-off for a while. The 0.6x series wasn't good enough (stability mostly) for what I needed but starting with 0.7x I found it was up to the task to handle my spreadsheets (though they're not as complex as yours by the sound of it).
I noticed the Excel import as being one of the items that improved the most (after stability) in the recent releases. There were some concerns about reliability for WRITING excel format but I believe these are now also taken care of on the whole.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
Assuming that the source for Microsoft Office was open, the logical thing to do would be to use their code to import and export these formats. After all, in the absence of a published standard, whatever these output is the standard for what a word Document is. If the goal is compatibility theres no better way to get it than using their code.
A more logical way to do this would be something like the relationship between Mozilla, Galeon and Netscape - you have 3 different browsers, but with a great deal of code sharing which avoids a lot labor spent reinventing the wheel yet again.
Why?
- KOffice — Runs on qt
- StarOffice — Closed source.
- GnomeOffice — Okay, by saying this, you're proving your lack of knowledge. Gnumeric _is_ part of GnomeOffice!
- ApplixWare — Closed source
- Corels Office Suite — Not supported anymore, is it?
What I'm getting at is a couple items. First off, Gnumeric has been around longer than a lot of them. If you read the release announcement which was _just_ sent, you'd learn that Gnumeric has been around for 3.5 years. Second, it's _the_ spreadsheet program which didn't have a history of non-GPL issues. KSpread is relativly new. And anyways, that has the history with qt not being GPL compliant. Anyways, if you look at Gnumeric, it's one of the more mature of the spreadsheet applications.I don't know what version you tried but we should be damn near pixel perfect for borders, patterns, formats, content and values. Sheet objects like buttons and drawings still need work.
The release notes would be useful.
Several of the core Gnumeric developers use it for real work, and based on our bug reports so do many other people. Most of us are working on the project because we are so familiar with the pain and the power of MS Excel (tm). When it works it is a hugely powerful piece of work, but when it doesn't you are up a creek. The 1.0 version of Gnumeric will not replace MS Excel (tm) for a power user. However, it should be sufficient for most day to day users. The goal is to produce a platform that will be able to do all the things we're used to, and hopefully we're on the right track.
/. scooped us, and posted before I'd sent the release announcement.
Gnumeric started 3.5 years ago well before StarOffice began its transition to OpenSource. Our goal has always been to produce a the best possible spreadsheet, and we chose the GNOME project as our toolkit. I've looked at the source for kspread and attempted to borrow code from OpenCalc and have concluded that while they each have their strengths, Gnumeric's architecture feels like it is a better basis for development. Try loading large or complicated workbooks into either and compare for yourself.
The GNOME project has a well developed and evolving toolkit specificly _because_ of projects like Gnumeric, Evolution and Galeon. A toolkit without developers does not progress very quickly.
Also, "save as Gnumeric XML file format" produces a binary file. I've never seen a binary XML file before...
That "binary XML file" is just a compressed XML file.
Try this:
zcat binary_XML_file | less
That's coming...
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Gnumeric is enterprise ready, because it is capable of being automated (via Bonobo) and scripted (via VBA, Perl, Python, etc). In fact it beats the crap out of Excel in every area I can think of including flexibility of its automation model and security (MS does the first well and the second not at all). So this is big gnus...
The real issues will be a Powerpoint replacement, scripting capabilities in Evolution (which should not be too hard to add via Bonobo), and a replacement for Word which is scriptable and automatable. KOffice is nto there yet, nor is StarOffice, and I have yet to be able to INSTALL Office without using WIndows, so WINE is not yet there either.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I have person at work that actually typed a column of numbers into a spreadsheet, added them up with a calculator, and entered the total back into the spreadsheet. Talk about underutilization!!
DCMonkey
I've been a avid gnumeric user for a few months now, closely following the development. Version 1.0 really adds a lot of great stability improvements and bug fixes. The excel filter is great, it allows me to import any excel file I come across at work with great accuracy. keep up the good work!