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Gnumeric 1.0 Has Arrived

Posted by timothy on from the good-gnews dept.

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."

12 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. how good is the Excel import? by jreynold · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I had my wife using gnumeric long ago but when
    it couldn't read in one of her more complicated
    excel spread sheets worth a crap, she just dual
    booted like she'd done previously. I haven't
    touched gnumeric since. How has this improved?

    By "complicated" I mean LOTS of borders, patterns,
    formulas, graphs, etc.--not just two lists of
    numbers....

    Peace.

    1. Re:how good is the Excel import? by wurp · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, I have yet to find any spreadsheet program on Linux that will read in my invoice in MS Excel format. I used the MS Excel invoice template to build the invoice.

      Gnumeric 0.7 crashes when I try to print or print preview the file, KSpread just won't read the file, and StarOffice won't save the file after I change it! I have tried various methods of saving as different formats, and even totally rebuilding my invoice (not based on any MS crap). I have yet to find a useful tool or method for printing a pretty invoice under Linux.

      Also, "save as Gnumeric XML file format" produces a binary file. I've never seen a binary XML file before...

  2. Gnome should stick to the GUI and System Tools by shaw7 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Personally, it feels like Gnome is waisting a bunch of time on apps like Gnumeric when there are very well developed apps that do this available already. If gnome would focus on the GUI and creating great GUI system management tools, that would help it's desktop much more than a *very* light version of Excell!

  3. It's the apps! by GRH · · Score: 3, Interesting

    While I would love to see a mass migration to Linux, it won't happen without the apps. Granted, this is hardly a revelation.

    However, what if the Windows desktop domination can be chipped away at by utilizing <flamesuit> Linux apps compiled for Windows </flamesuit>?

    Conceivably, a number of folks who currently use Excel could probably work just as well in a Windows version of Gnumeric (or pick your Open Source equivalent).

    Over time, as people migrate from Windows apps to Linux for Windows apps, they may eventually reach the point where they ask "why am I still running Windows?" and move to Linux.

    Although Gnumeric may not be the best example of this, one of the touted advantages of GUI tookits for X are their cross-platform availablility (I'm specifically taking about Qt, and yes, I know Gnumeric is not Qt).

    Lowering the transistional pain to small steps seems the only way I can see Linux eventually having a presence on the desktop.

    Anybody else think this makes sense, or am I having a lapse of reason on the last day of 2001?

    Happy New Year,
    Greg

    1. Re:It's the apps! by Jody+Goldberg · · Score: 2, Interesting

      While your goal is noble I think you miss an important point. People are only willing to switch to something new IF the transition is relatively painless. It is not an accident that MS Excel (tm) includes lots of old and ignored lotus-1-2-3 compatibility utilities. We can have the most fantastic spreadsheet in history, and it would still be largely ignored unless there is an easy way to convert XL files to/from Gnumeric. Which is pretty much the plan. Once we have a spreadsheet that can interact well enough with XL people can extend it to add all the lovely innovations they can think of. Remember the MS mantra 'Embrace, Extend, ...'

    2. Re:It's the apps! by psamuels · · Score: 2, Interesting
      A good example of where the quality of open source software overrides the lack of support is with GCC. GCC is commonly used in production environments over other Unix compilers because it is such a better compiler than most other compilers.

      A bit OT, but oh well. What you describe was certainly true in the past - vendor compilers were such a mixed bag that GCC has extensive release notes detailing how to bootstrap it with various other compilers without tripping numerous known bugs. And of course many vendors bundle a sub-optimal C compiler with the OS and make you pay extra for their Real Thing.

      But gcc is not the Holy Grail of code generation. Not anymore. IBM and CodeWarrior both beat it senseless on PowerPC; Intel has something that apparently does better on x86, and a lot better on Itanium; DEC has kicked its butt on Alpha for years.

      (Of course, gcc probably has more CPU backends than any other C compiler out there - but within a single architecture it often is not the best.)

      Having said that, I still use gcc in preference to any other compiler - for several reasons. First, it's a known quantity, and if I want to use gcc extensions (varargs macros are probably my favorite) I can. Its warnings and errors are not objectively the clearest in the industry, but to me they are because I'm so used to them. I know the compiler will do exactly the same thing on AIX as it does on Linux and HP-UX, within reason, and I can skip the licensing issues (the HP-UX bundled compiler is lousy, and AIX doesn't bundle one at all). gcc doesn't crash (well, it did once, in 1993, and I sent off a bug report) and its code generation is good enough not to be an issue for me.

      The fact that it's free also means that you can always get the latest version without having to relicense or upgrade.

      Oh yeah, that too. I'm the Licensing Czar around here (nobody else has the moral fibre / anal retention to care enough, I think) and the reduced hassle of free software is great.

      --
      "How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
    3. Re:It's the apps! by lkaos · · Score: 3, Interesting

      But gcc is not the Holy Grail of code generation. Not anymore. IBM and CodeWarrior both beat it senseless on PowerPC; Intel has something that apparently does better on x86, and a lot better on Itanium; DEC has kicked its butt on Alpha for years.

      (Of course, gcc probably has more CPU backends than any other C compiler out there - but within a single architecture it often is not the best.)

      Well, that's really the trade off one makes. The difference is speed of generated code is not extreme though and in comparision with other main stream compilers (what would /. be without bashing MS) such as MSVC, it just blows the competition away.

      GCC's nice because it tends to be more standards compliant then alot of compilers. It's funny that you mention the HP-UX compiler because that is what we were formerly using and when we started a new project, I insisted on using a version of GCC-2.95.2 that just happened to be laying around.

      I can't even begin to tell you how much hassle it saved. Pair it with GDB and the other utilities (such as gprof) and it's just incredible.

      The best part is, to get the GCC installed on a machine, all it takes is a phone call since there are no licensing issues. I definitely have to give you some credit if you take care of Licensing, because that is definitely a bitch. I would do anything to avoid having to deal with it.

      Unfortunately, I have to say I have encountered quite a bit of bugs in GCC :) That's ok though, it's not with the C compiler it's with the C++ compiler and the C++ specs suck so much, how can anyone blame GCC for messing up a bit ;-)

      --
      int func(int a);
      func((b += 3, b));
  4. Re:That is true, but... by markov_chain · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Frankly, I don't find either option that important (kill excel & flawless interoperability). Rather, I appreciate having a featureful set of office apps for free; if I were running a business, I already could use exclusively open source-- from OS to the apps. The office apps like this one or Staroffice are similar enough to Windows stuff that low-level workers could use it without much trouble.

    --
    Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
  5. Re:That is true, but... by Virtex · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Where I work, the only thing I've ever seen people use Excel for is to write TEXT data in a tabular format. No formulas, no math, no graphs, just rows and columns of text. I see things like inventory lists, roles and responsibilities, etc. For that kind of use, HTML tables would work just as well. Based on what I see around me, I'd say Excel's features are very underutilized, and even the simplest of spreadsheets could take its place for what most people do with it.

    --
    For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
  6. Re:Curve fitting? by Linuxathome · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Ahhh...you've asked a very good question. There are very few applications out there that can do quick and easy nonlinear regression analysis. As a biologist, I'm not interested in the math and the complicated equations modelling the best fit curve. All I'm interested in is the curve fit and the extrapolation of data after the fit. And so it would be very helpful if there were graphical applications that catered to me (and the thousands of other biologists out there like me). As I said, there are only a few applications out there that do this sufficiently--not even Excel can do a decent job. Yeah sure, maybe MatLab or Mathematica can do what I want, but they're not catered to the life scientist. One good app is GraphPad Prism, whose developer created a great website for biologists at Curvefit.com describing the differences between the historical linear regression analysis and the (much better) non-linear regression analysis. There is yet another piece of software whose name eludes me at the moment. The problem with GraphPad Prism and software like it is their hefty price--even with the student discount, the software costs over $300, which is way over my price-range.

    Now, if Gnumeric can only fill this void or any other linux app for that matter....I can see on the Gnumeric webpage screenshots section that one of the tools listed is "Regression" analysis, but I venture to say that it probably means linear regression analysis. Would anyone out there know if non-linear regression analysis will be implemented (if it's not already)--as described at curvefit.com? There is a huge potential market of scientists out there that is yet untapped. I think this is where linux can definitely beat out Windows--that is, if there was a suite of good, affordable, consistent software out there for the scientist (well, I mean the life scientists), more and more of them would migrate to linux rather than use Windows. Just my 2 cents.

    --
    Linux at home
  7. Just a question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I haven't used gnumeric for a while now and was wondering if it now has support built in for Gnome Basic or some other scripting lauguage. If it is reasonably documented I can use other languages as well. Many of my spreadsheets qualify as "spreadsheet applications" and need quite a bit of flow control type logic.

  8. Does it run on FreeBSD? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Does Gnumerics have any Linuxisms which
    prevent it from running on BSD Unix? I
    run FreeBSD on all my machines and would
    love to have an alternative to Microsoft Office.