Study Recommends Gnumeric Over MS Excel

Jody Goldberg writes "A recent study of analytic quality, and responsiveness to problems strongly preferred Gnumeric in place of MS Excel. With new problems popping up in Office XP the case for spreadsheet users to migrate is only getting stronger. In some related Gnumeric quickies, a new stable version 1.2.6 was released, and Open has done an interview with the Maintainer."

Comments

Gnumeric's RND was *too* random

[wowbagger]

I love that one of the "failings" of Gnumeric was that the random number generator function RND was *too* random - Gnumeric uses the /dev/urandom device that generates random numbers from noise sources in the system (noise diodes, interrupt events, user input, etc.) rather than using a psuedo-random number generator with a predictable sequence.

True, there are times it is nice to have a "random" number generator that you can re-run for testing, but having a really random number generator is better for a host of problems.

Jumping the Gun?

[Peorth]

It seems as if they're moving way too prematurely on this. In the article it said they posted to a Microsoft newsgroup and didn't receive a reply, and that this means that Microsoft will never fix the bug. Obviously there -may- be some tech support people roaming the newsgroups, but it would've made much more sense to simply contact Microsoft's technical support department and talked with someone directly about this error.
This is similar to having your car found defective, and then placing a flyer downtown to ask the company to contact you about options instead of picking up the phone and dialing the correct number.
I'm not a fan of Microsoftian ideals, but wouldn't that have made more sense before going all this way?

Re:Jumping the Gun?

[jalet]

Did you ever try to get a knowledgeable MS technician over the phone ?

I think not.

I use excel all day

[HMA2000]

I use excel at work all day and I have to say that no Open source solution comes close to providing what I expect a spreadsheet to do.

The idea that one should switch from excel to an open source solution because of a small set of statistics problems cannot be properly solved by excel seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water. (unless you do nothing but statistical modelling all day)

Re:I use excel all day

[Y Ddraig Goch]

If you are using VBA in your spread sheet you need to move to a better solution - a dbms and a decent programming language. You are doing the equivilant of using a table knife for a screwdriver. I've used spread sheets in the fashion that you state. I've also written dll's to be called by said spreadsheet. It's MUCH faster (performance wise) to use a programming language (Delphi, Kylix, C/C++) and a dbms to achieve your results. The learning curve of programming is a language is a little steeper but the payoffs are well worth the effort.

Re:I use excel all day

[blenderking]

That sounds great, but I live in a world of a locked down PC controlled by my IT division. I'm a power user in Excel, using pivot tables, mild VBA, mostly for automation between linked files, and in general using the 80% of the features most people don't use at all.

True - VBA shouldn't be used for extremely complex items, but for my use, and other power uses - it's tremendous in it's automation abilities.

Re:I use excel all day

[kannibal_klown]

"If you are using VBA in your spread sheet you need to move to a better solution - a dbms and a decent programming language. You are doing the equivilant of using a table knife for a screwdriver."

However, you're suggesting we use a bulldozer when a shovel will work just fine.

I work for a Pharmaceutical company as a software developer. Our scientists use Excel spreadsheets as reports; they enter in some raw data (or it's streamed in from an external program) and a combination of VBA and Excel formulas do the rest. These spreadhseets summarize data, predict flows, highlite trouble data, etc.

THEN, in some cases (at least those that are needed), we have the ability to export the data stored in the Excel spreadsheets into Oracle tables.

The spreadsheet acts as an intermediary for the scientists. It gives them something visual. They can modify things themselves, look at graphs for select data, etc. In some cases, they've even written their own VBA code to perform certain tasks. It's a horrible language, but simple enough for someone to pick up.

Try writing software to allow them to do all of this, and to work with about 150 different macros that were written in the past. A biologist is not going to try to learn C++ or Java, because it's too time consuming and overkill for what they need. And any application, as simple as you make it, will not be as customizable and visual as Excel. You'd be robbing them of that important aspect.

Sure, VBA is a pain in the ass; I wish it would go away forever. But it's made its niche; it allows the non-computer-savvy to do complex things. Anything better would be overkill and would reduce functionality.

Conspiracy!!

[bruthasj]

Someone had to pay for this little Gnumeric study! Get out the torches ... oh, wait.

Not really the battle

[biodork]

The reason people won't switch away from MS Excel has nothing to do with technical specs and everything to do with the very large number of Macro's and templates already written. There is an awful huge installed base for whom Excel works fine, and they don't see the problem. Most of the financial services sector for example. From there point of view, it's not broke Why fix it?

If TODAY everything was equal, there would still be a 10 year lag until a change happened, as that is the roll out time, and the time to convince people they 'want' to change. It better have some kick butt feature that they don't have in Excel, or they are going to resist change. That is just the way people are

Re:Not really the battle

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If I weren't posting on this thread, I'd mod that up as Insightful.

Advocates of new software, particularly OSS, often seem to forget that market share counts for a huge amount. Some studies we looked at back when I was in academia suggested that you need the "10x factor" to force a switch from an established product: your alternative must provide 10x the perceived benefits, or be 1/10 the price. That's a very big barrier to entry, and having a product that's only just become a challenger on technical merit and reliability is nowhere near it. (It's a good start, though!)

Inertia a two-edged sword

[0x0d0a]

Keep in mind that inertia works both ways. Yes, there's a lot of folks that don't want to move. However, it's equally difficult (possibly worse) for Microsoft to regain any customers that do move. Also, actual movement tends to lag decision-making for a while, so visible market share lags actual inertia by some amount.

Finally, keep in mind that even upgrading from one version of Excel to another can break compatibility. The office world has very strong backwards-compatibility requirements. Gnumeric may not fill those requirements, but we also know that Excel doesn't do so.

Finally, some sense!

[redelm]

I've been using spreadsheets for over 20 years, since Lotus-1-2-3 ver1A on a 128 KB (sic) 8088. I think MS-Excel is unsuitable for any serious use. Aside from ease-of-use issues (regression and other stats not easily accessible) there seems to be serious defects in the core calculation engine.

I've seen spreadsheets where MS-Excel would miscalculate results by 20%. MS-Excel also has enormous problems handling circular spreadsheets. Both are probably related to defects in the order-of-calculation algorithm.

Re:Finally, some sense!

[mschaef]

Excel also has (had? this might be fixed in 2003) some problems with things like standard deviations, etc. Run a standard deviation of 666666666123, 666666666246, and 666666666369, and you won't get the expected value of 123. Rather, you'll get 0. The high absolute values of the three numbers causes rounding problems by pushing significant bits out of the mantissa of IEEE numbers.

Despite the fact that this has an easy fix (mean center the data before computing the deviation), Excel has had this problem for years.

Maintainer?

[Chromodromic]

Can we please not capitalize "the Maintainer"? It's a bit too "Logan's Run" for me, or for anyone I think. Geekness has overstepped boundaries when Those Who Are In Control of Software are afforded the same nobility in print as the King, the President, and the Messiah. Let's remember that software engineering is a discipline, a job, and that we, as a group, can't produce bugless office software, much less achieve such status in society that we must be addressed by our titles, that those titles must be honored, that the masses must gaze upon us and tremble ... which, by and large and not incidentally, they do---but only geeks would assume that it's in awe of our deep knowledge of C++ and Java ...

Stupid Rant

[j-turkey]

I didn't read all of the linked article -- so whatever...however, I will say this: Anything that makes Microsoft Office look bad and (insert cheaper solution here) look better, I like.

For a $1000 computer, I pay ~$400 per license for MS Office Professional -- that's 40% of the cost of the computer. If I could convince management and our user base, I'd change to anything else because anything else would be cheaper (Star Office, Lotus Smart Suite, OpenOffice, whatever). I checked out Open Office with one of our accounting guys, and it worked just fine with all of his macros. Peace of mind against FUD just isn't worth that much. MS Office is a fine product, just not worth the price. If there was anything with a remotely competitive amount of market share, I'm sure that MS would drop their prices to stay competitive.

Re:In defence of MS people

[Spoing]

1. Some people at Microsoft do listen, you just have to make a bit of an effort to find them. Curiously, a comment from the developer in question was that the dev teams love direct contact with customers prepared to give them helpful information about bugs or feature requests, they just wish the PR people would stop getting in the way. :-)

...a perfect example between the difference in OSS and closed source.

I've worked both sides of the fence, and realize the differences. There are base motivations that drive each to do things differently. Still, I was stunned when I asked Theodore Tso a question in email a few years back, and he not only responded quickly but even sent a patch for me to try out!

Solver:?

[rangek]

The only thing I use Excel for is Solver. Solver turns Excel into the worlds easiest to use linear/non-linear optimizer for ANY function you can put in a spreadsheet. I use Gnumeric a lot, but I always have to go back to Excel for Solver...