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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.
on how long it will take until MS changes Excel to make it incompatible with this application?
My guess is that they will release a new security patch for Excel within a month.
This account has been seized by the GNAA. That is all.
The greatest limitation of excel for scientific calculations is that number of rows is limited to 64k.
I was hoping the open source or free versions would overcome this limitation but none of them do so as this makes them incompatible with excel.
can't someone figure out a smart solution for this without asking the user to modify the source themselves??
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
This is utterly shameless. You can save things in compatibilty mode in excel, so that they can be read by previous versions of the software, most users know this already. How the hell is it OOO's fault if the file is password protected? The chart is from the company that makes the software, not a unbiased third party, I could craft a document that would work better in one program or the other, I have not seem OOO stoop to that level. And another thing, Planmaker costs money $50 USD or Euro. This is an advertisement masked as an article.
I hate sigs.
As the vast bulk of the excel spreadsheets I deal with are embedded in word documents, the "bundling" in Open Office is far more important to me than anything else, and Open Office's excel compatibility is already "good enough" for most people.
This is what FreeDesktop.org people need to realise: The single MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do is agree on a standard Linux component embedding (OLE/COM) technology, and then maybe one day people _will_ have the choice of using gnumeric instead of OOo Calc to read excel data embedded in word documents being edited in OOo Writer. But
it DOESN'T WORK YET.
Microsoft just dictates their OLE in their normal stalinist style, but we can't. So we need to have a lively technical debate, and then broad agreement on a baseline set. I recommend specifying protocol, not binary API, in the normal X fashion, but make it good!
As much as I applaud Gnumeric for their great implementation, it's still a Linux/Unix only implementation. PlanMaker and OO are both cross-platform for those who can't ditch Windows. If a user can't leave Windows behind, that places Gnumeric out of the running.
Can it open OpenOffice spreadsheets? And how fast can it do it?
As a person who writes software which can read/write OO files I see a couple reasons why OO sheets may tend to read/write more slowly.
- The OO files are compressed zip files. Gotta spend a few precious seconds uncompressing them.
- The files contain very verbose XML which has to be parsed. My guess is that Excel sheets in a lot of cases have far fewer bytes to accomplish the same thing.
Caution: Contents under pressure
What linux actually needs is a spreadsheet app that can run VBA.
From working in a large company I can say that most people only ever used a small number of features - excel becomes a requirement because "programmers" write utilities in VBA!
Surely being VBA compatible wouldnt be that hard, it is a joke of a language.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
This is true, but if you're limited to Windows, there's a case to just use MS Office. If you're looking for cheap (free) implementations, OpenOffice is certainly the way to go, and PlanMaker is certainly something to consider, but if you're going to go with a closed-source application on a Windows platform *anyway*, it makes sense (as much as it's uncharacteristic to admit it) to consider MS Office as a full office package. After all, if you're on Windows, you won't necessarily have too much issue with the concept of proprietary software, especially as a business, so why fight with emulation and whether your alternatives can handle all the Excel stuff properly? Why not use MS Office, where you don't have compatibility issues? You've got the choice to use something else, which is good, but on the Windows platform, you also have the choice of considering MS Office.
The review says it has no support for macros.
What sort of serious spreadsheet user doesn't employ macros?
And they're selling it for Linux - a platform where most users know how to do a bit of scripting.
If I were in a Linux shop and had to do power-user type spreadsheet stuff, and this were the only Linux option, it would be enough to motivate me to sneak in a copy of Windows so I could get my job done efficiently.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Actually it's an excellent product. Granted the Mac Version is better (amazing by how much), but it is in my opinion the best office suite available. My only complaint is the price.
I like OpenOffice as well, however I never use any features that would conflict between OO and MS Office with the exception of passwords. However, you should never use an MS password if what your storing is actually important. Downloading cracking tools is very easy and free (astalavista.box.sk). Real encryption is necessary for critical documents/spreadsheets not the garbage built into access/excel/word. I've cracked so many competitors stupid presentation info it's sad really that they trust adding a password at all (pdf's as well).
MS Office is great but overkill for my company so we just use OO and it works well and is missing any license violations/bsa audits.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been programming with Visual Basic and Excel Spreadsheets for a major corporation (The Visual Basic + Excel part is not by choice). I have really learned about how powerful Excel is.
I think the main thing Open Source spreadsheet programs need to compete with Excel is something fully compatible with Visual Basic code, as crappy as it might be. Or at least something to migrate from the Visual Basic to some other kind of scripting language with the same functionality.
hey!