Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Excel Clone for Linux Now in Beta

Posted by michael on from the gnumeric-also-a-possible-choice dept.

Martin Kotulla writes "SoftMaker, a German software developer, has released the first public beta of PlanMaker 2004, a native-Linux spreadsheet that is highly Excel-compatible ... in fact, this app is basically Microsoft Excel ported to Linux, including Excel-compatible charting and even AutoShapes. Here is a chart comparing Excel, OpenOffice.org, and PlanMaker." Update: 05/07 19:07 GMT by M : Softmaker.de is temporarily down; the site can still be reached at softmaker.com.

2 of 393 comments (clear)

  1. Near copy of Excel? by LordSah · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Now that's innovation. Originality at its best. If only I had the ability to think up features like that.

    I guess it'll probably be cheaper than Excel proper. One reason is they didn't have to pay any designers or usability experts. Thanks, Microsoft, for doing all that.

    This is conjecture, as their server seems already dead.

  2. Re:The wrong path by Minna+Kirai · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    This is not the case for MS. If it is, please provide a link to the MS Office document _specs_ and not just some silly schema.

    I'm told that the schema for XML files that Microsoft provides here are sufficiently detailed to count as "specs" for those kinds of files. (Those documents were released less than 1 month ago)

    Of course, that doesn't change the fact that MS Office doesn't really use XML files. Not only are XML files not the default output of MS Office and Office's XML-output can't hold all the data their binary formats could, but most importantly, the normal MS Office products available to consumers today cannot export these XML formats. Only some rare "Pro" / "developer" versions have the exporting.

    So chances are, even if you did have the specs to read an MS Excel file in XML, your MS-customer friends wouldn't be able to produce them for you.