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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.
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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?
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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.
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I'm curious what was added beyond what is offered by Excel. Any really interesting little tidbits?
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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.
It's not quite ready for prime-time yet, but this is getting closer to being able to code your macros in Perl.
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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?
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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.
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.xsession my friend, this is where this kinda stuff is supposed to go...
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.
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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!
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
Format, I don't know. But VB is not supported as a scripting language, so Gnumeric is imune to macro virus exploits.
aurelien
There are two somewhat related issues to contend with.
1) The file formats are semi documented. We have rough ideas of what OLE2, BIFF[5-8], and escher look like. There are however, lots of abiguities and question marks. As a result we have lots and lots of validation on what get imported. OOo does the same, which is why we can frequently crash MS excel when adding something new to the xls exporter, but still be able to read each others output.
2) The format for VBA is undocumented a far as I know. OOo has a few guesses in place and I've started doing some research on it, but neither of us can even read the vba enough to worry about running macro viri.
3) what scripting capabilities we do have (eg in python, perl, or guile) are strictly sandboxed. We are definitely tending to err on the side of caution rather than functionality.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
There are certainly features of MS Excel that Gnumeric does not support yet. Pivot Tables and Conditional Formats are the main outstanding issues and are targeted along with scripting and accessibility as the top priorities for the 1.3 development cycle in the fall.
The 100% figure refered only to the worksheet function coverage. Sorry if that was not sufficiently clear.