Slashdot Mirror
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.
Comments with the authors name?
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))))
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.
I want an office where I can use whatever software I want for each function, not what others decide to be in a suite.
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.
guppi is OK, but I really wish they would port the guts of something like Grace over to Gnumeric. One of the things MS did correctly on Excel was decent graphing, and I would like to see Gnumeric use some really powerful plotting tools from the open source world (scigraphica might be easier to incorporate) and take that to the next level.
Oh - is there any way to keep the scroll bar from reflecting the fact that there are 65000 rows or whatever in a sheet? It really limits the use of the scroll bar.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Why is it bad to compare OSS software with a proprietary counterpart? I think it gives those that don't know about the software a chance to see how they compare.
If someone for example uses, MS Excel and wants to switch to the OpenOffice equivalent or Gnumeric in this instance, then they could see before hand if it contains all of the features they use frequently. At the same time it could show them features they have always wanted but could not get with the proprietary software. We compare things all the time. Is it really so wrong to do it with software?
Question everything.
Our goal is to produce a great spreadsheet.
Compatibility with existing products is required for people to be able to transition. We already have significantly better analytics than MS Excel. Over time we hope to become a superset of it in other areas too.
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
It's nothing. As a testament to the quality of the Windows sourcecode they keep seleral lines of code back from the early eighties in active use.
You apparently didn't have Gnome already installed.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It's not quite ready for prime-time yet, but this is getting closer to being able to code your macros in Perl.
7 You have to tipe commands
I can see how this would be a problem for you.
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.
I'm concerned that so open source apps written these days have names that demonstrate their affiliation with a particular desktop. Having names that begin with "gn" of "K" is a kind of flag waving that shows which desktop application framework was used (gnome or KDE).
Ideally the user should be able to (and usually can) run apps using either framework on any desktop. But when the name has "gn" for example, are they saying "well yes you could probably run it in KDE but it's a gnome app so maybe you're better off running it in gnome..."
Why is their so much tribalism? I think it's an important step in the maturity of Linux or Open Source in general to get to a point where the particular implementation (gnome or KDE) of any given layer (the desktop) has NO impact on other layers (the application) and so the title of the app should not even need to provide any hint of affiliation with a particular brand of in another layer.
Happy Birthday Gnumeric, looks like a great program. But as a user I don't think I should need to know about it's internal implementation thanks.
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
Well... do you program? They need those libraries to function, it's a much better thing than writing all the functionality from scratch. Reusable libraries make programming large applicaions, or even small ones, much easier. You don't want to reinvent the wheel everytime you write a program.
.xsession my friend, this is where this kinda stuff is supposed to go...
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.
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.
I really wish there was more consolidation in the OSS world. It would be nice if the Gnumeric developers could spend their time making OpenOffice calc even better. Gnumeric may be good, but OpenOffice will be what the vast majority uses in the future...
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
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 you can infer from this comment from Jody.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Or at least mods for it? I don't like to use decimal.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
And Excel supports pretty much all the functions that Lotus 1-2-3 supported. Lotus 1-2-3 supported pretty much all the functions that Visicalc supported.
What did Isaac Newton say, again? I started over from scratch and ignored the work of those who studied these problems before I had? No. "If I've seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."
Miguel has openly admired Microsoft's work in providing usable user-interfaces and applications that work well. He's also been critical of their excesses and lack of focus on security. Is it any surprise that Gnumeric (which aims to be able to import any Excel document) implements all of the Excel functions, but then extends them in its own way, adding nearly 100 of its own?
Personally, I don't particularly like Windows much because it doesn't work like I want to work. I'm accustomed to the Unix Way (or at least the Linux Way, though I did start with real UNIX in the form of AT&T SVR4, SunOS and Solaris). I really dislike Microsoft as a company, and anyone who thinks that removing choices and is a great way to make software easier to use. (Easier to learn, maybe, not not easier to use.) Hence, I don't run Windows at home, nor do I use MacOS X except via ssh. (My wife has a Mac in addition to a PC.)
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
well, um, M$ imitated 1-2-3 et al, then created file structures that locked everyone else's intellectual property (the contents of the spreadsheet in this case) into their own impenetrable file system theat ensures that you have to pay their toll just to share your work with someone else. One of the best features of Gnumeric, which I use often, is that the files it creates have a published scheme.
Gnuplot seems pretty good, but isn't a GNU app (as I understand it, it semi-predates GNU) or much of an open source app. So GNOME feels that they can't use it and I don't want to use it for philosophical reasons.
Everything else, as I've said, sucks. Guppi looks interesting , though. I can't seem to find out if there's any way to use it from an Apache server-side app. Anyone else know?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
1) Yes a couple of the routines are still subsets, but they tend to be corner cases (eg CELL). We'll need to finish them off before 2.0.
2) The web pages need work. I need to regenerate the function docs based on current CVS and setup some links from the status page to the docs.
Anyone interested in helping out ?
Correct versions of several functions that are broken in MS Excel. We need to support their incorrect values and the right answers so that imported workbooks stay the same.
More Statistics
More Random distributions
Lots of financial derivative pricers
1) In early 0.x versions we required you to set an env var before you could _overwrite_ a file in an exporter that was under development. Which seems pretty reasonable for a development release. That requirement was removed for all exporters before the stable series (1.0.x) was release a year and half ago.
2) The lines are
Sheet *
sheet_new (Workbook *wb, char *name)
{
Sheet *sheet = g_new (Sheet, 1);
do stuff
return sheet;
}
Ok they're not exactly high art, but Miguel started this project, and I believe in giving credit where its due.
1.1.x has an importer for sxc documents.
.gnumeric exporter for OO one day, but don't see much use in it given that we can read their native format and their xls.
It could be improved, but the heavy lifting is in place and the rest just requires some attention to detail. An exporter will be added eventually.
I'm tempted to write a
Please don't judge all of gnumeric based on the text import in 1.0.x. There have been lots of performance improvements and enhancements there in the development series. The core of gnumeric is easily capable of handling that magnitude of data. Try 1.2.x when it comes out next month (or even 1.1.x if you want to help beta things).
MS Excel is still somewhat faster mainly due to its memory foot print. It was written back in the day and bit bashes things all over the place. Gnumeric pays a penalty for using 32bit addresses rather than bit bashing 18.
If you have something that performs badly please _tell_ us. Our goal is to produce the best damn spreadsheet around. This is still version 1.1, 2.0 (extend) and 3.0 (extinguish) aren't due for a while yet.
We tend to split extension into 2 areas
1) writing functions. Which is supported and documented in python, perl, and guile (and of course compiled languages)
2) scripting. Which is currently unfinished and intentionally mostly undocumented. There are some experimental bindings for python, but we have not had the time to select a solid enough api that we could commit to it. Gnumeric tries to under promise features, and I don't want to whip out some half baked api. The 1.3 development cycle will target scripting and we'll likely wrap the selected api in python, perl and corba initially.
We could use some help on this.
A truely native port is possible, would be alot of work. I'd rather see a native version of gtk+ for OSX. That would help alot more projects.
How far are the various ports from being usable ? I've heard that film-gimp has been working on gtk-1.2, but have not researched it. Are there any gtk2 efforts in the works ?
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!
undo levels are configurable.
You can set the number of levels, and a logical size limit. undoing filling an entire column is more expensive than entering a value.
Most everything else is 'limited by memory'
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 !
It's compared to MS Excel simply because it's the best spreadsheat application around. Just as the Gimp is often compared to Adobe Photoshop (originally a mac application) and MS IIS to Apache.
1) If you can crash it please _tell_ us s othat we can fix it. 1.0.x has been very stable.
2) The interface to guppi was weak in 1.0, the new engine in 1.1 is much better integrated.
3) I'm not clear what you mean for the sorting dialog. File a bug.
4) We have started moving past MS Excel in places. Improvements to dialogs, more functions. We first need to have a foundation that can cover the existing fetures before adding wild new ones or no one will be able to leave MS Office. People generally want to bring their data with them to new applications.