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Gnumeric Now Supports All Excel Worksheet Functions
unmadindu writes "The latest beta release of Gnumeric has been released. According the the developers, it is now ready and stable enough for general use and deployment, and the final 1.2.0 release will be made on September 8th. This release also marks the realization of a major milestone -- all of the worksheet functions in the U.S. version of MS Excel are now supported. I have been using 1.1.19 for quite some time now, and it is incredibly fast, and hugely improved compared to Gnumeric 1.0."
it could be very cool to support the sxc (openoffice) format. what about this ?
Ploum.net.
Why don't they integrate this thing into OpenOffice?
What about macros, I know that's a major problem with people switching from Microsoft products. Anyone got a VB - php parser? (Or whatever language Gnumeric uses for macros)
It has many more functions that are not found in Excel, but ALSO having support for everying Excel supports means that any Excel sheet can be opened and used in Gnumeric.
Gnumeric is compatible. It is faster. It does more. That seems better to me, even when ignoring the price tag and lack of Evil(tm) technology.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Oh, and by the way, there's only so many ways to make a usable spreadsheet program. If a standard spreadsheet application exists, and a way of doing things already exists, why reinvent the wheel? This is just so people can be free from the Microsoft grind of upgrading every couple of years to a new, more bloated version of office.
There's still a long way to go though, just because we have all the functions of Excel doesn't mean that it's Excel, or that people won't have functions in Windows (i.e. Macros in VBA) that they need (Like in accounting).
Well, if it doesn't have all functions of Excel, you can't load all Excel worksheets. So you don't have a full, compatible replacement for Excel. If it didn't have all functions, it would be just a "me too" wannabe.
Lars T.
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I can't see them doing this without signifigantly screwing over their own user base. Not that M$ is above screwing over their own users, but Excel and the rest of Office are big sellers and I'll bet they want to keep it that way.
How long will this be true for? Excel 2003 is coming out soon.
All functions, as defined by their list of functions, is somewhat different than Gnumeric working the same as Excell. For example, I would be amazed if the graphs embedded in spreadsheets and generated from the data look anything like they do in Excell; they certainly were not ever readable in the versions of Gnumeric I've used. Sure, they have a function that calls something that supposedly makes graphs, but the graphs just ain't right. And A.F.A.I.K. this function was on their "already working" list the last time I checked.
I also want to see memos that I've attached to cells in my spreadsheet not vanish when imported into Gnumeric, as well as graphics embedded in a cell. Does anyone know if these now supposedly work?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The functions to calculate integrals (need that to calculatr bond rates,) sucked big time in Excell. Insufficient precision.
If you're working on a multi-million dollar, long-term bond that comes to quite a bit of change dropped betwen the cracks.
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What do you think made me switch all of my business (and most of my personal) software from MS products to open source in the first place?
I got really, really tired of chasing their arbitrary changes to Office that were clearly designed to make me purchase new licenses for products I already had.
Years later I'm still a happy camper with Python, KDE, Open Office, MySQL and even vim.
In my personal case MS was the best Linux "advocate" anybody could even want.
KFG
Well, Office 2003 retails October 23rd. That a good date for you?
Then again, since "XML" appears to be the Word Of The Day on the Office XP website, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I agree. VBA is very, very useful.
OpenOffice does support something very similar (though not code compatible).
Gnumeric, AFAIK, has hooks to control it through Python scripts. That's a start, but I don't know that the Python code can be embedded in a spreadsheet. If it can't, they should work on that. Embedding Python code in a spreadsheet would kick butt! Python has VBA beat by a light year.
What happens if some of these functions don't quite work identically to Excel's in 0.1% of cases, be it for a bug in Excel or Gnumeric? I don't see much rush for converting existing work to Gnumeric, just because of this risk factor.
If they change the format to be incompatible, that will probably won't buy them much time when OSS is incompatible, but then they're stuck with fully supporting the old format anyway. They can try to force upgrades to use the new format, but it will take many years to get rid of the files in the old format. In that time it just serves as a source of bloat and bugs in MS's software. That gives more reason to switch to an open format which is more consistant.
I can dream, can't I?
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
I'm curious to see how Gnumeric performs in terms of its implementation of certain complex functions, such as Solver. Anyone know where we can dig this information up?
I just tried out a copy of Office 2003.
At work I use Office 2000, and use Excel a lot, etc.
I was previously using XP (2002) at home, and I noticed that there wasn't anything added on to Excel, or really to anything, just made it more "prettier".
The same is true with 2003, save Outlook which has been revamped.
It seems as MS is insisiting on keeping the same things. I know there are things here ad there that are updated, but nothing that would make you want to upgrade over 2000, and that's pretty sad.
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Microsoft lock-in detrimental to Microsoft's goals? I think not. Are you familar with the phrase, "It's not done until Lotus 1,2,3 won't run."
After all, when you learn Linux, you already have to learn Shell, Perl, PHP, etc. [non-MS stuff] just to keep UP and be useful why make every single app do it's own thing rather than build soms synergy between them. I don't think Linux needs a VB clone. MS has already killed it. RIP VB!
And we can read their encrypted files too, _the horror_.
:-)
Thankfully there's not much to worry about here. A few years ago MS published a series of 'MS Excel developer's kit' books. There wasn't much in the way of useful material so for actaully developing extensions to MS Excel available. So, as far as I can tell, Microsoft tried to pad the book with what it figured was some marginally interesting filler, a full set of docs for the xls file format
When I bought the book I was quite irrate at the lack of useful content. It warms my heart all these years later to actually be able to put it to good use.
PS
They also included the full content of the book in various MSDN discs, and on their web site for several years. Then mysteriously pulled it a few years back.
And? Screwing everyone over with the format makes money for Microsoft. I worked for a Fortune 500 corporation that wound up having to move to Office 97 - a few people got it and started passing around spreadsheets. We couldn't ban them for political reasons, and couldn't get everyone to save it down to 95. So... several months later, we moved to Office 97. I believe it was corporate-wide.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
They're somewhat stuck. The sheer mass of users for older versions of MS Excel limits their ability to change the format in any meaningful way. XL97 was the last time it changed at the core. The amount of shrieking between 95 and 97 was huge. This is one of the reasons Excel will very likely not support more than 256x64k for a long long time. Their file format would implode.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if they have not considered it, but the opensource xls readers tend to be alot more resilient than MS in handling xls. We've had to code defensively sue to poor/missing docs. It will be hard for them to produce anything we (Gnumeric and OO) could not figure out pretty quickly, while still allowing XL97 to handle things.
Good point.
There appear to be a few functions specific to the asian version of XL, notably
'PHONETIC'
that we (and every other opensource spreadsheet) are missing. I've been in contact with some Japanese developers, and we'll hopefully get some support from the Japanese govenrment to get these added as well.
Our stated goal in the Gnumeric project is to produce the best spreadsheet available. After some consideration we decided that Gnumeric seems likely to produce that sooner than OpenCalc. OO is an important project, but as a spreadsheet user I have little interest in an office suite. There are quite a few users out there that seem to have similar views.
This is not a winner take all situation. OOo is the right solution for some users. However, Gnumeric is better is several areas already and with some work, we'll move past Excel in more places too.
If you want an Office Suite, by all means use OO. If you want the best possible spreadsheet I'm guessing that people will end up using Gnumeric.
Interesting.
Can you forward a copy of the file with the miss imported fonts ?
Please file a bug about 'replace by'. This is still a beta there is time to polish things before 1.2.0
Yah, it would be nice to have image preview in there. Its a simple project hopefully someone will tackle it.
How is the zoom dialog worse ? bugzilla your complaints please. They'll be easier to track/debate there.
Of course while Lotus was an effective spreadsheet, I have often thought that Excel owes more of it's philosophy to Quattro.
Nice work demolishing that troll, keep on going! Yeah!
It is possible to emulate, so that the user of M$ junk is not lost in the interface or data export, yet innovate by providing more and better functions. The world of free software is vast and includes routines for all sorts of math works. There are free libraies for arbitrary precision and forrier analysis for example. Why not have a nice little face on them in a free spreadsheet? Microsoft's limitations are not a straight jacket for the free world.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The ad sez that Gnumeric support _all_ Excel functions.
But where's that Pivot Table function that not only Excel had, but also Lotus Agenda ?
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