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Gnumeric Turns 5
Jody Goldberg writes "Five years ago, Miguel committed the first code for Gnumeric to CVS. In a testament to the quality of the code several lines are still in use. Since that time the project has grown to more than 300,000 lines and now supports all 325 worksheet functions in MS Excel, plus almost 100 more. This seemed like a good time to thank all the people who have contributed to Gnumeric over the years. We're about to start the run up to the the next stable release which will be out in a few
weeks and we look forward to continuing work with GNOME, and the community at large to produce the most powerful spreadsheet in the world."
I use gnumeric all the time, I read MS xls files without any problems. Its also faster to start, and looks better, than OO (which I also like). Its my favorite of all of the Linux office apps.
I use MS Excel almost everyday for data analysis, and the most annoying part is that number of records cannot exceed 65536 in Excel. Anyting larger than that, we need to get the data into Access and work in it, and that's not very fast and easy. What's the limit in Gnumeric?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
How does Spreadsheet in OpenOffice perform against Gnumeric in terms of functions, compatibility with other spreadsheet programs ect?
This project could do with some marketing. I genuinely had no idea that it was even comparable to Excel in terms of features, and I'm no Linux n00b. One of the problems with OS software in general, I guess. And what has to change.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
I'm curious what was added beyond what is offered by Excel. Any really interesting little tidbits?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Why in the hell does it have to be so fragmented?
# apt-get install gnumeric
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
bonobo-activation gconf2 gnome-mime-data libbonobo-activation4 libbonobo2-0
libbonobo2-common libbonoboui2-0 libbonoboui2-common libcupsys2 libfam0c102
libgal2.0-3 libgcc1 libgconf2-4 libgcrypt1 libgda2-1 libgda2-common libgnome2-0
libgnome2-common libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0
libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomeui-0 libgnomeui-common libgnomevfs2-0
libgnomevfs2-common libgnutls5 libgsf-1 libgsf-gnome-1 libidl0 liblinc1 liblzo1
libopencdk4 liborbit2 libpopt-dev libpopt0 libstdc++5 libxslt1 libxslt1-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed:
bonobo-activation gconf2 gnome-mime-data gnumeric libbonobo-activation4 libbonobo2-0
libbonobo2-common libbonoboui2-0 libbonoboui2-common libfam0c102 libgal2.0-3
libgconf2-4 libgda2-1 libgda2-common libgnome2-0 libgnome2-common libgnomeprint2.2-0
libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomeui-0
libgnomeui-common libgnomevfs2-0 libgnomevfs2-common libgsf-1 libgsf-gnome-1 libidl0
liblinc1 liblzo1 libopencdk4 liborbit2
The following packages will be upgraded
libcupsys2 libgcc1 libgcrypt1 libgnutls5 libpopt-dev libpopt0 libstdc++5 libxslt1
libxslt1-dev
9 packages upgraded, 31 newly installed, 0 to remove and 485 not upgraded.
Need to get 12.0MB of archives. After unpacking 41.1MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
I'm serious. People in the Windows world use Excel not only to calculate stuff, but as some kind of application platform. Personally I think that's stupid in most cases, but not offering it is even worse.
Maybe I just couldn't find it anywhere, but: Is Gnumeric easily scriptable? It doesn't have to be Excel or VBA compatible (in fact, about every other language would be better, IMHO), it doesn't need an integrated IDE with debugger etc. like Excel has, but the only thing I could find so far is a "plugins" directory containing .so files - that can't be it. Is there something better, and if so, why the f**k isn't it documented prominently?
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Right now there isn't a free office suite for OS X that doesn't run under X11 and hence look like donkey, though there's apparently an unreleased beta of a native KOffice that uses Trolltech's new Mac OS X native QT toolkit.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
TheLastUser,
In your experience, can you comment on whether the Microsoft excel-format security flaws and macro virus exploits affect Gnumeric in any way? I am verry curious as to how Gnumeric implements an unstable Microsoft format without rendering some sort of security risk to a local user exploit.
Thankyou.
>2 GPL is anti-capitalist
this is bad how?
>3 Its hard to use
Depends on the end user. My mother has problems with Windows and that is classed as "easy to use"
>4 Its unstable
The kernel isnt, the X applications are.
>11 RMS is a communist arsehole
What has RMS done thats so bad you have to call im an arsehole? Just ignore him if bugs you.
>15 Its not from microsoft
you put this in the wrong list, that should go in the "Why Linux will survive list"
>17 Anyone and their 14 year old brother can add (buggy) code
Why does this bother you? the patch wont get accepted if obvious bugs are in it. And besides Windows has probably more bugs.
--voor
It looks like a great replacement for Excel... why not make it buildable on Windows too?
I know that half the point of creating great desktop apps for Linux is to encourage the use of Linux on the desktop, but it also limits the usage (and therefor usage and availability of developer support too) of the product.
These days, there's almost no technical limitation to writing code that can be compiled on multiple platforms. Usually the limitation is the UI toolkit (gee, like Gnome?), but there are many cross-platform ones available too (like Tcl/Tk, etc.)
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
However, while they both support all sorts of Windows formats and predecessor Linux formats (OLEO, e.g.), they don't support each other's file format!
Feel free to mod me down, but working with ... For this kind of
...
really large spreadsheets in Gnumeric is
a pain; it's way too slow. Reading in a tab-delimited
file with 12 columns and 40,000 rows takes minutes
(this is microarray data). I have compared
Kspread, Gnumeric, StarOffice, OpenOffice, even
Siag (scheme in a grid). They are all substantially
slower in than MS Excel
work, I'm afraid I really see myself forced to
work with Excel (which, incidentally, runs
fine in Crossover Office; this is what I use on a
daily basis, because 1) Windows as a platform for
my kind of work is a joke and 2) I despise Microsoft)
In other words, if I had the time to do work on
Gnumeric, I would be only too happy to start working
on its speed when dealing with huge spreadsheets
If Linux and GNU are going to get big, they have to innovate and write better software, not just emulate what the big guys are doing.
Interesting. So if Linux and GNU stuff perfectly emulated existing commercial (and expensive) software, which do you think would be big?
In many ways open source DOES innovate. Microsoft recently "discovered" Kerberos. IIS has been playing catchup with Apache forever (except in terms of conf wizards). Apple "discovered" BSD (well actually NEXT did, same diff). IE supposedly might finally have pop up ad blocking that the Mozilla has had for a loooong time.
I get your point, but I think you would agree that compatibility with existing popular applications is more important than new innovations. Once Gnumeric and Excel of equal feature-wise, then the race to innovate can begin.
Finkployd
Or at least mods for it? I don't like to use decimal.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I recently integrated a macro preprocessing engine written in C++ into an ancient, pre-ANSI-C assembler that I didn't write. :-)
At least language wise, those two languages are just close enought to be dangerous. The styles were completely different. But I was able to integrate them by keeping the modularity sane.
To integrate something like gnuplot into gnumeric, they'd have to work on keeping the interface small, well defined, but still large enough to support all the desired functionality. Not impossible, but not a task I personally would envy.
Program Intellivision!
Funny you mention OpenOffice and KOffice as pushing out Gnumeric. It was a mere 4-5 years ago that GNOME camp was going apeshit because of rumors that KDE crowd was going to incorporate GIMP into their desktop. My how times change and political spin works..
GNU/Linux/etc. are different things to each person that uses it/them. Never assume that we all want Linux to be a big desktop system. That is not my personal goal when I sit down to write software which I just happen to release under the GPL.
Please contact me (jody@gnome.org)
We've got a new charting engine in gnumeric now that will be released as a standalone library after gnumeric-1.2.x. Its goals are similar to gnumeric but on the charting side. Which means that it aims to have a superset of MS Excel's functionality. Thankfully that is alot easier for charts. The framework still needs a few extensions before I'm ready to split it out, but its already pretty capable. Adding a png or svg exporter would be fairly simple.
guppi is deprecated and unmaintained. The next Gnumeric will have a completely redone graphing framework.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
How well does Gnumeric handle xls files from non-English versions of Excel?
In particular, the formulae in non-English versions of Excel are saved into the xls files using their non-English names - can Gnumeric cope with that? (This is totally brain dead behaviour, IMHO, - not only does it mean that an English Excel can't understand non-English files, but if the function name has a non-Latin 1 character in it and you don't have that font, then even if you have the right language version of Excel you still can't edit the formula, only run it! This kills sharing Excel spreadsheets internationally. Why, oh why didn't they use numeric codes in the file and translate?). [Disclaimer: I've seen this for Excel = v.97, haven't looked at newer versions.]
As a side question, how does Gnumeric save formulae in its own-format files?
I originally tried Gnumeric a long time ago, in v. 0.something, at the time it didn't have the functionality I needed. I shall certainly try it again. Thanks for all the hard work!
it is truly an awesome SS, except for one little thing. you can't formt the cells to have vertical text. the dialog box says unfinished. which says alot about OSS because ni commercial app would ever have that, but it still remains undone. i wish that one little thing would get done. if i was good enough i'd work on it, but i ain't. could some one please!!
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Contrary to what have been advertised, there _are_ something that Excel does, that Gnumeric doesn't.
For example, Gnumeric still doesn't do Pivot Table.
While I do understand that Pivot Table isn't really a big deal to many, there are times that functions such as Pivot Table comes _very_ handy.
Please, Gnumeric Developers, please put the Pivot Table on top of your "todo list".
Thank you !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !