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NewsForge Reviews Excel Clone for Linux
martin-k writes "NewsForge has a glowing review about PlanMaker for Linux, a new spreadsheet for Linux that is much more compatible with Microsoft Excel than the competition and speedier, too. PlanMaker has Excel-compatible charting and AutoShapes and reads and writes any Excel file you throw at it. Here is a chart comparing Excel, OpenOffice.org, and PlanMaker." Yes, Virginia, NewsForge is also part of OSDN, like Slashdot.
Let me be the first to say what everyone else is gearing up to say.
gnumeric exists. Acknowledge both its existence and superiority in the world of spreadsheets.
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50 bux for a spreadsheet app? I'll stick with the free Gnumeric instead.
One of the best spreadsheets for linux, gnumeric has support for 100% of Excel's functions as well as most of its other features. Its one of the highest quality and most stable pieces of software I've ever seen for linux. Its amazing they overlooked this as competition.
In this case the question is simply wrong. SoftMaker is around longer than most software companies. I remember the first SoftMaker adverts in a PC magazine in 1987, where they announced their TextMaker for 149,- DM (Deutschmark), which was a 5th of the usual price for a text processing software at the time. Germany had always several small office productivity companies, and one of them brought us on the road to OpenOffice (StarDivision, now bought by SUN), and SoftMaker is also still alive and kicking, working from the beginning with a "sell cheap, sell enough" model for their software.
They survived all the storms of time by getting large contracts with public administrations like towns and counties. And there they probably got most of their bugreports from, because a town administration can be sure to get lots of quite strange documents, in content and in form.
can't someone figure out a smart solution for this without asking the user to modify the source themselves?
If you need more than 64k of data use a app made for scientific work, like R, mupad or Mathematica.
This has nothing to do with the open source community. It's a proprietary app that happens to run on Linux. Also, OpenOffice spreadsheet already weakened userbase of Gnumeric, which was and is a better and more compatible app. I don't see you whining about that.
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Performance. We will increase PlanMaker's row limit (basically, the sky is the limit) once we have tweaked certain routines, like sorting and transposing.
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
``99% of the sheets I use here involve macros to open many .csv files, process the data in a particular way and then dump it all into pivot tables that are linked to other Excel spreadsheets.''
That sounds like a database to me. Using Excel as a database is one of the most harmful things there are. It's slow, eats a lot of memory, and I have seen entire databases go to hell because of slight bugs in the macros or the interpreter.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This (and the company's word processor, textmaker) are included in the boxed version of SUSE 9.1 Professional.
However, I just tried the trial version of PlanMaker for LInux and it had no trouble displaying the graphs exactly as they should and was able to open even the largest file in just a few seconds.
Horay for a viable alternative, even if it is not open source.
Gnumeric includes just that
ssconvert foo.xls foo.csv
- download gnumeric
- edit SHEET_MAX_ROWS in gnumeric.h
- compile