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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."
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.
Well, to find out, you can simply look at the changelog...
1.0:
-changed i++ to ++i (Miguel de Icaza)
0.99.0
-changed i=i+1 to i++ (Miguel de Icaza)
0.76:
-the darned thing looks better as i=i+1 (Miguel de Icaza)
0.75:
-changed i++ to i+=1 (Miguel de Icaza)
0.74:
-actually, i liked i++ (Miguel de Icaza)
0.73:
-changed i+=1 to i=i+1 (Miguel de Icaza)
(...)
As you can see, gnumeric has made great progress. I highly reccomend it over KSpread to any self-respecting linux user.
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.)
The release notes would be useful.
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
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).
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.
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.
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