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?

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.

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?

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.