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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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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!
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?
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.
-
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?
- 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.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!
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
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...
/. scooped us, and posted before I'd sent the release announcement.
Well, you haven't met me face to face either, but I love Excel. For my money, Excel, Word 5.1 for MacOS and recent Internet Explorer are the three worthwhile things Microsoft has done.
It has a terrific interface, excellent integration between data and graphs (this is where the Linux options all fall short for me) and a lot of the features that you guys keep saying nobody uses are invaluable for my data collection and analysis. If only source were available so I could add keyboard switching between sheets!
By the way, this is all talking about the MacOS version. Windows Office may well be as bad as generally reported here. (Like the guy saying that the SO presentation software is more stable than PowerPoint. Is he completely on crack or are there actually stability issues with the Windows version? I have never seen the Mac version fall over or hang, ever.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
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 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!
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.
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
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
This is simply a "verbatum" copy of Excel. There's nothing innovative here.
The best curve-fitting software that I've ever used is a shareware program called MacCurveFit: very fast, a simple interface for entering arbitrary equations and initial parameters, and one of the few programs that returns the error in each parameter of the fit (from the covariance matrix...much simpler to interpret than R^2). Anyone interested in writing a free software equivalent would do well to look at its example.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
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.
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)
Then you might want to drop the spreadsheet entirely, and go for R. R is a very beautiful system for statistical computing and graphics, and it is very powerful. I know there is quite some R code in Gnumeric, most of the statistics comes from there.
I think there has been some talk about a more extensive interface between Gnumeric and R, but I don't know what happened.
There is some more high-level GUI tools for R as well, but I have never had any use for them, so I haven't even compiled it, but there might be some things that are sufficiently spreadsheet-like there that you can use.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
hawk
ok, first you may need to "cd
I dunno if it's in the packages yet.
hawk