Slashdot Mirror
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.
So how long before Microsoft chanages Excel to be totally incompatable with their old file format and/or functionality, just to screw the open source community yet again?
It damn well will happen... It's just a matter of how long.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
...does it support the flight simulator too?
If not, then I'm not interested, thank you!
Actually I use the Open-Office spreadsheet quite a bit at work, and can't see any reason to change to be honest. Part of my job involves perl scripts that generate .xls spreadsheet reports at night for users to view the next day and my tests with OO render them exactly the same as the users see them with Excel.
;-)
BTW, the reason we switched to doing this was due to the old system; where Access was running on PCs, and generating reports was so damned slow! It may seem unbelievable, but changing from Access+MySQL (we replicate from our Oracle server for reports and other stuff) to Perl+MySQL on Linux resulted in a staggering increase in speed. Reports that were taking an hour are now completed in under 2 minutes! The method I use to convert from Access->perl is, firstly take the Pseudo-SQL Access generates, then customise it a bit for MySQL, then use the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module for perl. It's great!
I've never used Access myself BTW, and don't really understand what the hell it's doing to use all the CPU cycles. We watched it's activity one day - it ran a query on the Linux box, which took 12 seconds (monitored it with "top"), it then pegged the Windows PC - a P4 2.4ghz - running Access at 100% load for a good 20 minutes generating a spreadsheet!! WTF?!
So, to anyone else suffering with slow Access reports, learn some perl
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
From the graphing functions to its statistical capabilities, I consider Gnumeric to be on part with Gimp itself as an example of the quality that the Open Source model can create.
Any idea whether there is a windows version? Now that would be a good idea. I don't know why there isn't more work Open Source development being done for windows. How about giving Microsoft their own taste of "embrace and extend" by using Open Source on Windows as a means of reaching those who aren't likely or able to move over to Linux? I for one was VERY glad to see that Gimp had been ported to windows. I kept getting asked by windows users if there was a good alternative to Photoshop and now I can finally say yes without qualifying my answer with "but it only runs on Unix."
Microsoft isn't nearly as afraid of Linux as it is of the Open Source / Free Software movement/model itself. The technical quality of Microsoft's products is often lackluster, but when it comes to business strategy its leaders are grand-masters. They'll bankrupt you using an inferior product nine times out of ten. So far open source products like Linux have frustrated their ambitions to move up into the enterprise server arena but that isn't the same as going after them in their own backyard. Linux CAN be every bit as useful as a desktop OS as anything Microsoft or Apple has to offer, but it isn't quite there yet. Soccer moms and secretaries simply aren't going to move over to Linux because it isn't what their computers ship with and it isn't what everyone else is using. It also requires a degree of technical acumen that almost no-one posesses. The same is true of Windows of course, but that doesn't work against it since it's already in the dominant position. Those of use who do posess skill and talent with computers often forget just how mysterious the things that seem obvious to us are to most people. That is why Linux is stuck in the server room and will be for the forseeable future. If we can't displace Windows on the desktop, why not use it against its masters? Imagine if all the open-source application work that has been done for Unix was targeted at windows as well? Everyone who owned a computer would be using open source software in some capacity, and many would be aware of it. This would make it much easier to move people off of windows onto something better.
Before this movement to something better can occur however Linux needs to be made more luser friendly. Before you can sell something to someone you have to show how it is better than what they are already using and how what they are using is detrimental to them in some way that the replacement is not. Just making a better mousetrap isn't good enough when your potential customers have already invested in another model. Your mousetrap has to kill more mice AND include a feature whereby human fingers will never be smashed by it accidentally. Right now Linux is comparable to Windows as a desktop os in most ways. It needs to be better than windows and not plagued by the problems that windows is burdened with, or at least those problems that end-user clueless types consider to be important. Creating end-user apps for the platform where our end-users are is the very best way I can think of to gain insight into what they consider to be important. By ignoring windows as a platform for open-source development we're only helping Microsoft keep the barrier to use of Open-Source products artificially high.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
For christ's sake, slashdot, GNOME has had a new logo forever. Can you please update it?
Actually, Microsoft Excel sweeps those cracks every evening, and any loose change it finds is transferred to a secret compartment in your Microsoft Wallet. Then the next time you use your Microsoft Passport to access your Microsoft Hotmail account, Excel quickly grabs this money from your Wallet and tucks it into the back of your Passport, where it's slipped to the Microsoft Agent program that inspects your credentials.
You've all heard how Office products are one of the two main revenue sources for Microsoft. You didn't actually think all that revenue just came from sales, did you? ;-)
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
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.
GeekWares - Buy and Download Today!
Its a question of resource allocation. For any time we spend polishing our xls import export we get access to the installed base of MS Office. Whereas time spent on OOo's formats yields a much smaller number. Given more resources we'd spend more time on it, but for now I threw together an importer in a couple of weekends, and have only received one bug report in 6 months. given the documentation for the OOo format, and more importantly the existance of readable code that impliments it, it would be a simple project for someone to improve our support.
I do not claim that Gnumeric supports 100% of the features in MS Excel. That will not be until version 2.0 ('aka Extend') which I'd like to see go out within the next year. The language in the release notes was very explicit
"100% of the worksheet functions"
That refers only to the functions callable from expressions in cells.
The Gnumeric team has been fairly anal about never claiming to support a feature that was not complete. Our Charting engine has long been a source of pain that never quite managed to find its niche. Which is what has delayed the 1.2 release for almost a year. Our new engine is targetted explititly at supported a superset of MS Excel's charting so that, like the rest of Gnumeric, things look just right when you import from xls. I've spent time ensuring that things are practically pixel perfect given the right fonts.
We've supported reading and writing cell comments (memos) from xls95 for years. 1.1.20 adds that capability for 97/2k/XP too. Not sure what you mean by 'graphics embedded in a cell'. Please file a bug report with more details and we can keep track of the request.