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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."
but when, when, when is there going to be a PowerPoint option for Gnome? Otherwise how can the managers be convinved to leave MS-Orifice?
I think we're beginning to gnotice a pattern...
OTOH, it seems that the pace of GNOME development has been quickening as of late. Now, I haven't reviewed the API/Object Model for several months, but at last glance I was beginning to notice some real cohesion in the various components. For a long time I have preferred working on KDE's code, but I'm beginning to wonder if it's time to take another glance at good ol' GNOME...
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
I suspect you mean guppi the graphing program, not the graping program that Emory University offers.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Now is your chance to get graped by Guppi! Sounds kinda erotic.
Just because Excell has like a bazzillion features (that most people don't use), doesn't mean its the best. The software has to match the job being done. The office I work at could get buy with what Gnumeric does. They don't require all the fancy bells and whistles that MS puts into Excell, so I don't see how its better, since in my case its like putting 50 pairs of clothes in your car when your only going to be gone for 2 days.
Can all fish swim?
Maybe I'm earning my nickname here, but I saw only a version 0.99 release candidate 2...should I just round up and shut up or am I missing something here?
Ted: What?
Bill: The Gnome graping program. The little guys make wine and even do your taxes! Open source booze, dude! Excellent!
Ted: Dude, he's talking about math.
Bill: Bogus.
very nice milestone, a lot of bug fixes. The excel support was the big selling point for me.
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.
The main market for spread sheet apps should be accounting etc.
Does anyone use linux spreadsheet apps for such professional purposes ?
Managing private stuff doesn't count.
Would be interesting to know if linux does penetrate such conservative/ non-IT markets.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
What (specific) features in Excel do you use that make it so much better than GNumeric? I'm not intending this as a flame. I use Excel on a pretty basic level, so I'm curious what it offers that make it better.
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!
What criteria are you using? Sure it has lots of features, but the only possible explanation for how many misfeatures (most likely bugs, but you never know) it has is that the people who write it don't use it. It makes all but the most basic of tasks anywhere from annoying to painful. Writing macros for it is an exercise in masochism, especially with its oh-so-helpful error messages which can usually be summarized as "something bad happened". At least someone had the good idea to make the debugger stop on the line where something bad happened or it would be impossible to write macros in it.
Excel might be many things, but the only thing that it's the best at is causing pain. Well, it's reasonably good at the various embedding that microsoft is so fond of (and even a few non-ms people like too, apparently).
Still, I haven't met any people face to face who actually claimed to like excel, and I'm talking about the various non-technical people at a bank, most of whom have little more than heard of linux.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I will be curious to see when 1.0 makes it onto Red Carpet. The last two release candidates, 0.99 and 0.99.1, never did. Since I would bet the majority of Ximian users get their updates via Red Carpet, that means a large chunk of their user base never saw the preview releases.
The only reason I bring this up is Ximian just recently announced their for-fee Red Carpet fast subscription service. As I recall, a common theme in that discussion was questions regarding how up to date (not up2date!) the Red Carpet channels would be maintained. This doesn't seem like a great start.
#DeleteChrome
MMM...wine... Maybe you meant, "whine?" If you want good spelling functionality in life you should lay off the wine and hit a dictionary. Listen to me whine!
[figz@figz figz]$ kill -9 `ps -ef | awk '$1=="figz" { print $2 }'`
We want good groping functionality in Gnome. Thank god that Pornzilla is nearing 1.0!
Fair enough, it's your point of view. I agree Excel will never be Gnumeric. My point of view is that Excel is the alternative for Gnumeric, useful if you are forced by your management to interoperate by exchanging Excel spreadsheets. ;)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Have there been any advances in curve fitting? This is the one thing that I use excel for, and one of the few things that keep me from defaulting linux on bootup. (That, and CAD)
Is it me (probably) but is the 1.0 version not on the web site?
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Neat. This makes, what 47 different spread sheets for Unix/Linux now? KOffice, StarOffice, GnomeOffice, ApplixWare, Corels Office Suite, etc. All from different code bases? Funny, I thought that aside from all of the "Software should be free" propaganda, the point of open source software was be able to modify others code to suit your needs instead of reinventing the wheel every time. I realize not all of the above are open source, but still. Couldn't say, Gnome Office and KOffice share big chunks of their code? Like, say the parts that they use to handle the Microsoft formats? A great deal of time and energy is nessecary to figure them out, why replicate it 5 times?
Why?
Ahh, but see... are we living in a world to kill 'Excel, the Great Satan,' or should we be trying to make the two interoperate flawlessly? I really pride Excel on its embedding features... a step needs to be made to provide a bridge between the two.
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
The one day I don't have mod points. Mod the parent up alot. Biggest problem with open source is not user interface issues or complexity its the insane amount of duplication of effort for the programs that people actually use or would want to use.
-
If we all wanted the same code base we would be using Microsoft.
Anyway, how do you know that they replicate efforts on features like importing and exporting Microsoft formats? Have you looked at the code bases for all these and found completely different code? I think not.
Although GNumeric is a great program, and I appreciate the effort, it is not Excel
No, but it is exactly what I (and, I suspect, various other people) need: a simple way for me to be able to do most of my work in Linux and still be able to submit a timesheet to the nice people in accounting.
90% of the spreadsheets out there use 10% of Excel's capability. Most people don't know how to use most of Excel except the simplest bits. So for my money, Gnumeric doesn't have to be Excel. I've got real work to do.
(Of course, those in the audience who count beans will want Excel. Have fun.)
And the only reason Excel has all these features (and will continue to have more) is that without them, M$ would absolutely no way to perpetuate the money stream that comes from the endless upgrade treadmill. So it's not that these extra features are necessary, or even useful - it's that without them, M$ can't make money. Why more people can't understand this is beyond me.
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?
3Y3 4m 1337 H4x0r d00d [uz 3y3 h4v3 L1Nux!
Looking at human behavior, one must draw the conclusion that people will always take a homogenous group and turn it into a heterogeneous group. It doesn't seem to matter what the subject is, this seems to be the pattern. People almost never unify things. Given that, one would expect there to be many projects with the same focus.
It looks like duplication of effort is a part of human nature. Of course, in any case, my effort is worth more than your effort. Or, wanting another saying, "if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself." Sad, but true via empirical evidence.
- 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.If you want a timesheet program, write a timesheet program (web frontend, VB, C+Gnome, whatever).
Using Excel+Email as a timesheet system has always been the height of Microsoft office automation braindamage in my book. Unless you are someone in accounting that likes the makework.
Besides you miss the point of Microsoft Office's popularity entirely. 90% of the spreadsheets out there may use 10% of Excel's capability, but across a larger organization, 90% of Excel's features are being used. The bloat price you pay is pre-emptive compatibility with something that you haven't needed yet.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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!
Looks like guppi is a Graping program... accourding to this search at ask.com
:)
From what i gather hear.. its the same as graphing!
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.
The release notes would be useful.
Then why open your mouth? For some of us, who respect Gnumeric as the most mature open source spreadsheet around with the best feature set and stability, this is great news to us....
Celebrate the finer things in life
When you can't get the best programmer in each field to design/program each element there's bound to be duplication as new versions are written that behave (either in function or interface) in what is percieved to be a superior way. If evolution works for software then the best code will eventually be borrowed for other projects or just generally used more. In other words, if several different wheels are invented simultaneously across the globe, the optimal wheel is more likely to be found.
Also remember that the software is not the only output of programming. There's also the additional experience and skills gained by the programmer.
People see duplication of effort and they assume that it must be a bad thing, but it's not.
Thinking that it is a bad thing is based on the assumption that these people who are "reinventing the wheel" would have worked on a more established project of the same type if they hadn't done what they did, which isn't true. These coders are all voluteers, and they ONLY hack on things that are INTERESTING to them.
Besides, a lot of the failed projects of today are going to be the start of tomorrow's best hackers. Don't bitch about what people choose to do for free.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I think the open source community should produce open document formats. However, at the very most all someone has to do to figure out how a Koffice or Gnome Office produces its files is to dig into the source a little. However, our publishing a document declaring "This is what a Word Document is" is a little pointless when we don't have any control over what Word might happen to produce(Past experience would tend to indicated Microsoft doesn't eiiither...back compatibility, Bill?).
Why?
Each of the office suits you name has benefits and drawbacks of its own. If all the developers of all those projects were going to try to colaborate on The One True Suite, they'd have to set aside their differences and make comprimises. The result would be mediocre and would squash the individual efforts.
If all the kernel hackers in the world tried to colaborate on The One True Kernel, their results would be mediocre as well.
When all the best musicians get together to make an album you get Hands Across America and The Three Tenors, not Mozart or Van Halen. (Your tastes may vary, clearly.)
I was going to mark this post 'redundant', since this issue comes up in every thread, but I thought it more constructive to explain in words, rather than a moderation: it is false to call the efforts of these various projects wasted, since each developer works towards whatever is important to him or her. Their efforst would only truely be wasted if they all came up with the same result (identical software AND developer experience).
Plus, as the trolls are pointing out, you can also use IceWM as the window manager in both Gnome and KDE.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Windows is great! I mean, look at everything that runs on it: Office, Quake, viruses, Doom, viruses, IE, VBScript, more viruses, jEdit...
they do have completely different code, basically. Everything is different enough to be able to be able to copyleft it themselves. :)
There are a few common dependancies... low-level image/video/etc format drivers mostly... like libjpeg.
-EvilMonkeyNinja
Mild Mannered Host by Day
Wild Hammered Programmer by Night
Unix wouldn't be as good as it is without having been reimplemented so many times. These spreadsheets will undoubtedly borrow from and compete with one another. When the dust settles, there will be a great SS app.
As for waste, that's too bad, but it won't happen any other way. The import code, being dependent on the internals, probably won't transfer anyhow.
I use Gnumeric to keep all of my businesses books on. Mind you, it's not a particularly complex task - Revenue, expenses, payroll and that's it. Each on its own spreadsheet.
If you're wondering what business, I own and operate a theatre.
I also use Kword for my modest word processing needs. I would like to use AbiWord, but have never managed to make it print properly to my Canon BJ250 printer - the letters always come out squashed together.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Interesting. A GPL'd library (Qt) isn't GPL compliant. Very interesting indeed. I'm sure Trolltech would love to hear about this.
That's one more reason why I don't use GNOME or WindowMaker anymore - all their supporters seem to have nothing better to do than bash the alternatives. I'm sure they're very nice technically, despite their C origins, but that's no reason to flame the good people at KDE at every opportunity.
Excuse me best? excel .... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
oh gawd you are funny. Excel is far from best at anything.
it cant do calculations right, (search slashdot, you'll find the stories, and search google. several professors will fail students in chemistry and advanced physics for using excel because it doesn't do advanced math correct. (97,98 and 2000 dont.. noone knows about XP as the entire scientific arena have abandoned it. but I bet that XP is nothing but 2000 with pretty colors)
Only an idiot uses excel for anything important... and I have the entire upper management of my company to prove it!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The one day I don't have mod points. Mod the parent up alot. ( :-) )
karma capped
No Star Office is *not* open source. Open Office is but Open Office is branched off of Star Office Sun could close Star Office at any time they feel like it.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I use the Excel flight simulator on a daily basis. Do you know of a Linux spreadsheet with that functionality?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I don't know Gnumeric or Gnome, but humor me. How hard would it be to get Gnumeric to run on Windows? Possible strategies:
1) Rewrite the graphical part of Gnumeric to call the Win32 API, or wxWindows, or something that can call the Win32 API.
2) Write a generic layer that would translate Gnome calls to Win32 API, wxWindows, etc.
In general, wouldn't it be nice for the apps people are working so hard on to run in many places?
Dan
P.S. Please, no boring answers like "run VMWare" or "screw M$".
I thought I heard that Gnumeric had some kind of perl or python interface for scripting, but I haven't found any docs or examples (I've looked some).
If anyone has a pointer I'd appreciate it!
True, true. But those spreadsheets all use a DIFFERENT 10%. Get them all together and their union represents about 80% of Excel's features, particularly in the financial world (or even of most companies' CFOs).
Gnumeric is nice for the casual spreadsheet user, but worlds away from Excel's advanced features.
I use Gnumeric to calculate profits from option trading with Datek. Have been since about 0.6.1 or so. Works great!
And soon AbiWord 1.0 will be released.
I use KDE for my desktop, but Gnumeric and AbiWord are two awesome, lightweight programs. They give you just what you need to get your job done, without a lot of memory hogging crap.
My only problem is that you need Guppi 4.0 for graphing. I currently have Guppi 0.35 installed, but when I try to upgrade to 0.4:
[root@eclipse micah]# rpm -Uvh Guppi*
error: failed dependencies:
libguppidata.so.11 is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
libguppidataui.so.11 is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
libguppimath.so.11 is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
libguppiplot.so.11 is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
libguppispecfns.so.11 is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
libguppistat.so.11 is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
libguppitank.so.11 is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
libguppiuseful.so.11 is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
So is there a way to have both Guppi versions co-existing? I really prefer to stick with RPMs. Thanks
Why can't everyone quit whining when two people decide to do the same thing without giving each other all their code? I bet if linux was started last year everyone would say "what a waste! why doesn't he go work on OpenBSD instead?". If you're really that worried about the success of these projects, why don't YOU go work on one of them instead of trying to dictate what other people should do (when they are already giving away their work, too)?
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
hey bucko, sis I say I was bitching? No. I said that a problem with linux is duplication of effort. I should correct that. The reason why Linux will take forever from becoming a desktop OS (why thats the holy grail I don't know) is that we waste our time reinventing the fucking wheel. Last I checked the whole idea of OSS was to avoid reinventing the wheel. Hack on whatever the hell you want. But don't complain next year when once again Linux is not a desktop OS because instead of making one program the best is can be 20 people decided to write yet another spreadsheet program or mp3 player. Because god forbid we should submit our egos and work on someone elses program. I said its a problem. It is. God bless people that work for free but I don't want to hear the laments about linux not being a desktop OS next december.
grr argh.
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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
The true reality, the one that bites, is that linux users need to realize that linux is utterly useless as a desktop platform. Deal with it! The userbase is so small that no one is ever going to waste time migrating apps that aren't precisely vertical in nature (like Maya). In fact, linux only has one modern, competitive general market desktop app - Mozilla. The rest of the apps are useless or outdated (yes, StarOffic included).
Stick to using linux for serving and web development - thats one market linux can win.
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
This is truly similar to saying "6 billion people? How many of them do we really need?" If McDonalds and McRosoft had their way, they'd all be identical consumer-units, anyway.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
This is simply a "verbatum" copy of Excel. There's nothing innovative here.
someone PLEASE mod the parent up as funny, and the parent of that as troll.
(I already posted here so I can't...)
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
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.
Ok I'll fan this flame.
Interesting. A GPL'd library (Qt) isn't GPL compliant. Very interesting indeed. I'm sure Trolltech would love to hear about this.
Well perhaps your not aware that originally QT was only available under the QPL. Now its available under the GPL, but in the past is wasn't. This is why gnome was started.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
I was unaware of that. Anyway the point is originally QT wasn't GPL and that the problem with KDe that caused GNOME to be formed.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Wow and just a short 22 years since the release of Visicalc
http://www.kubuntu.org/
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.
Put that in -flashing letters-. Reality in less than 128 ASCII thinges. Yes! Thank you!
1000 SlashDot sigs
Let's burn some of my karma foopies on this...
:) Ask the KDE guys how great the C++ compiler is in GCC. True, it's free and fully functional, but please... so much better? Oh, don't feel obligated to provide facts to proof your point!
My largest problem with MS is not that they do not produce low-cost or even free software, but rather they that produce high-cost low-quality software.
Yadda Yadda!. So they produce low quality software? Which titles? MS Excel? SQL Server? Excel is a top notch program, which is by far the most usable and bugless application in the MS Office suit.
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.
This one really made me laugh
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
If you want a timesheet program, write a timesheet program (web frontend, VB, C+Gnome, whatever).
The point is NOT what I want. The point is "What will the people in accounting, who are in no way beholden to me, accept?"
The answer is Excel. Maybe a good choice. Maybe a bad one. I don't know, because I'm not a spreadsheet user, just a guy trying to use Linux without shutting myself off from the rest of the company.
I've often observed exactly the same thing. I've seen issue logs and defect reports kept in spreadsheets on a network drive, so they can be shared (imperfectly). Likewise, product data, vendor information, and lots and lots of project schedules.
I know that spreadsheets are not the ideal tool for any of these purposes. The point, though is that they are being used for these purposes. Rather than shrug and say, "Well, users are goofy." I'd like to figure out what makes spreadsheets appealing.
Most people use it as a kind of schema-less database-lite. Do away with all the troublesome database stuff like referential integrity and rigid schemas and it becomes simple enough for the average non-abstract-thinker. It's infinitely malleable, they don't have to go through ranks of DBAs just to add a column.
New column? Insert!
New table? Add a sheet.
The main usage pattern spreadsheets don't support well is sharing. Instead of sharing a single spreadsheet, most sharing is through copying. More data lives in spreadsheets in email inboxes than in the knowledge repositories. (Of course, these usually get printed out as soon as they are received, and used as reference long after the original has been revised.)
I've often thought that this usage "loose database" would be well served by some kind of multi-user spreadsheet--a common space where people working on a project could share semi-structured data.
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
Cool, it's almost like OLE2 in Windows 3.1 circa 1993.
Some companies do in fact Publish their file type standards. Corel for one has openly published said information every since it inherited its programs. It has to since said standards were already open and available on the web.
hawk
ok, first you may need to "cd
I dunno if it's in the packages yet.
hawk
Oh, now I get it.
[figz@figz figz]$ kill -9 `ps -ef | awk '$1=="figz" { print $2 }'`