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.

Comments

More sense

[barcodez]

Wouldn't it make more sense to work with OO.o not against them?

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[Tarantolato]

The extent to which OpenOffice is hyped has sadly cut into a lot of Gnumeric's mindshare, despite it being the better product by far. I know some people like to hate Miguel de Icaza for trying to port .NET, but he did a fuck of a good job on the foundation of Gnumeric and the present team has kept on making it better. Don't fall for "bundling": use the better program.

Non-Free

[4im]

Whatever it's qualities may be, this PlanMaker thingie is non-free (as in speech and as in beer). This makes it very much uninteresting for quite some people. If there's a decent alternative that's free (hint: there are, several), then that's the way to go IMHO.

How long can this last?

[RLiegh]

If it's as good at working with Microsoft's patented file format, and is so close of a clone of Excel; how long until Microsoft eliminates them through legal means?

Why not buy Win4Lin/Wine and run Excel?

[t482]

The product is $50 USD and is closed source commercial-ware. Why not just buy win4lin ($99) and run an old version of Excel 97?

Alternatively you get codeweavers wine for $40 and run your old MS Office tools and at the same time support wine development.

More important is to have OpenOffice have all the Excel charting functionality. Currently OOo Charting tools are a bit more crude.

Compatibility for WordArt is not at the top of my requirements list for compatibility.

Macros rear their ugly head again.

[Gilesx]

Okay, so I always seem to be posting this in reply to any Excel clone news whatsoever, but I still feel it's a totally valid point, and whilst this is the case I shall continue to post it.

What about the Macros? Surely this is one of the most important parts of Excel, and could even be one of the things that makes it such an indespensable tool for many companies. It gives it the freedom to move outside of the solely number crunching arena, and into a million and one other places.

It's all very well having a new Excel clone for linux that can retain my conditional formatting better than ever, but 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. These are business critical, and until these work 100%, with no additional effort (some of the people that have to use these sheets are barely computer literate at all), there is no way on God's earth that I can persuade the IT department to switch over to an alternative.

I guess at the end of the day, lockdown isn't lockdown after all when there isn't a viable alternative.

Re:Macros rear their ugly head again.

[arkhan_jg]

I'm sorry, but if these data handling functions are business critical, then you need a proper database (sql, basically) combined with proper data in/out.

The number of cases of huge excel/macro combinations dieing messily, or corrupting the data is legion. I'm no database specialist (network admin myself), but the guy I work with who is, has several stories of companies that regretted relying on access or excel/vb for critical data processing, and one of them nearly went under when they found one of their (many) linked spreadsheets had been corrupted and had been feeding bad data into their conclusions for months.

Seriously, PLEASE don't rely on a cheap and cheerful desktop products (which is what ms office and openoffice are) to manage your company dataflow. Get a proper system on the backend. Use excel to munge a bit on the front end, do the graphs etc, fine - but put your data-storage and processing into a proper database system. It'll cost you more, but it just ain't worth the risk.

Intergration is important

[eamacnaghten]

As end office users become more and more savy - which in my experience they are - the importance of OLE type functionality is becoming more and more essential. The ability to embed spreadsheets in word processor files, presentations etc etc is becoming vital, as is the ability for third party apps to insert data into it. I cannot see any mention of this on their site.

Also - the ability for it to follow the theme of the user's desktop is not yet considered important it is getting there.

I do not know the product, but I do not see the advantages it gives me ofer the free ones significant, and many of the free ones have advantages over it.

As far as interplay is concerned, can it talk the OpenOffice formats? These are becoming more and more deployed.

I'm sorry SoftMaker - you may have a good product, but it has no relevance to me - and I do not seeing it have in the future either.

Non-Free, Why not just use Excel?

[dilute]

If you don't have to be absolutely compatible, there are plenty of free (really free) spreadsheets. Gnumeric, being considerably more lightweight that Openoffice, does the trick for me most of the time.

When nothing other than Excel will do, why not just run Citrix (or some virtual box if you don't have access to a Citrix server) and run real Excel?

If you seriously need Excel, I doubt this will be a satisfactory long-term solution, for any number of reasons. Plus, it ain't free.

In sum, who needs another me-too piece of proprietary software?

My father, Linux, and the spreadsheet battle

[meganthom]

Does anyone know if you can make a bulleted list within PlanMaker without too much trouble? Yes, I know that this feature doesn't make much sense, but it's one of the major factors preventing my father from switching to Linux and from regularly using open-source office software. My dad gave up on Open Office in short order.

It seems that for open-source software, and Linux in particular, to appeal to the business world, the software must make the features business execs regularly use, such as tools for making memos, readily accessible and as similar as possible to the features in MS Office. My father, for example, is eager to try something new, but becomes frustrated when he needs to relearn everything or when he has trouble importing documents and spreadsheets from other programs

Maybe PlanMaker will convince him to give Linux another chance. I hope so.

You people are getting on my nerves

[Anonymous Coward]

First of to all those screaming gnumeric, rtfa!

Second, I can understand that people want to run a system that is 100% open source. If you want to, do it, but please also stop your whining, that this has not been ported to linux and that has not been ported to linux.

Softmaker is offering a spreadsheat that seems to be more compatible with Excel then other spreadsheats on linux. I can't possibly see how this is bad.

Re:Interesting....

[willCode4Beer.com]

Never tell me that the last thing I need is more choices. I use linux specifically because it give me MORE CHOICES.

ARRRGGG. This is the attitude that has caused there to be a dominant platform.
I don't want Linux to be dominant, I don't want Macs to be dominant and I don't want Windows to be dominant. When there is a variety of system, they need to embrace open standards (open source or not), and compete. This can provide better software for all.

Now mod me down because my rant is off topic.