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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.
I think I'll look at it. Sometimes OpenOffice.org chockes on certain Excel spreadsheets that I try to open in it. I'm curious to see if this will do any better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wouldn't it make more sense to work with OO.o not against them?
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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.
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?
We all assume that once it being a Linux product, it's open source, but I see nothing in the article mentioning that it is. So.
Is it open source?
Second, they claim better Excel compatibility than OOo, how did they manage this.
Maybe they licensed some code?
I like having good compatibility, from a technical point of view, we are only going to benefit from better compatibility if there is documentation on how it was achieved. Could anyone mail OOo a link to those specs?
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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.
besides..
- yummy rootbeer.
Shit, what Microsoft product hasn't been cloned for Linux yet? I want to make some fast cash! Let me know so I can get coding...
Please get this cloned for linux and I would send you ten penguins for dinner ( sorry no 'wine' in stock )
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.
.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.
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
I guess at the end of the day, lockdown isn't lockdown after all when there isn't a viable alternative.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
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.
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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.
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?
The best stuff usually isn't.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
Does anyone maintain a list of features OO doesn't support?
I know that the only incompatibility I found was when I had a formula that referred to a calculated value in another tab, and then yet another cell that referred to the first formula, I got an error when I opened the file in Excel. When I opened it in Excel, went to the formula and hit enter, it recalculated and got a non-error.
To example, sheet 1 A1 = 1, sheet 1 A2 = A1 * 2, sheet 2 A1 = sheet 1 A2 * 4, sheet 2 A2 = sheet 2 A1 * 5. In this example, sheet 2 A2 is an error in all versions of Excel I could find, and was good as of all versions of OO I could find last December.
I always got the OO errors about how data may be lost by saving in the non-native file format, but aside from the above case, I never lost any content.
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.
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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
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.
In speaking of not talking about GNUmeric because people may not like Miguel de Icaza for the Mono project:
.NET is a "creation" of Microsoft and we all know that Microsoft is the big bad wolf that wants to eat all our grandmothers - but still it may have good ideas and just because they are the bad guys, we should not forget the good things they may come up with and adapt those ideas (with even more good ideas from the free software comunity). .NET is proprietary software from Microsoft, but Mono is FREE SOFTWARE built with ECMA and ISO ideas. And I actually see Mono as the true .NET in realtion to it's "filosofy" as Microsoft likes to say. True multiplatform you get with Mono, not with .NET.
I don't really understand what is the real problem about it. Yes,
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
Its usability is way low compared to spreadsheets.
Thats just wrong - it depends on the task. Spreadsheets are the right tools for a budget calulation resulting in a nice formatted table for the boss. If you have more then 64K lines of data, you should use something like R, mupad, mathematica or octave - simply because they are more useable for this task - 64k lines of data do not need a pretty layout - they will (almost) never get printed - they need a tool to be transparently processed. Spreadsheets dont do this well (for example, you will hardly ever notice it if a cell was left out in a "Edit->Fill->Down" maneuver or if the formula in a cell was accedently modified while moving over the sheet). A high-level numerical computation language is far superior here. And BTW, if someone claims to be unable to use these high-level tools, I would hardly trust his/her "research".
64k lines is enough for everybody - because speadsheets with more than 5-10k lines are not savely manageable. Use a numeric package for these, if you do science or a database if you do accouting.
Always use the right tools for the job.
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.
Considering this software is non-free (in both senses), I am more tempted to ask what makes it better than Excel rather than what makes it better than OO.o
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Softmaker provide the xls files on their web page.
Chosing test files is part of the comparision. I wouldn't be surprised if the result would look differently by trying a set of xls files relevant for your own work. Of course in my case that set would be empty, I can't remember when I last came across an xls file. If I ever need to open such a file it will probably be because somebody email me one, there is no way I'm going to pay this amount of money for a program to read a file somebody send to me. At least I learned one thing from this discussion, if I ever need to read such a file, I should try both gnumeric and ooo.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
This (and the company's word processor, textmaker) are included in the boxed version of SUSE 9.1 Professional.
Actually, I venture that you really should be doing it in a database program. Spreadsheets are basically WYSIWYG, you use the mouse to do stuff to slabs of data you can see, but there is no way you can do that with millions of rows.
Much simpler to keep clean code too, when you just have a few lines or pages of code, as opposed to embedding it in a huge spreadsheet.
This seems a bit like the people who try to lay out books in PhotoShop, because that's what they know, rather than using PageMaker or the like.
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.
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.
Thats great, now they just need to make a command line interface for it. I was doing a project a year ago where we would get ms files and need to convert them. And the only way to do that was to manually launch excel and click click click to make it a CSV file text file. Simple functions like this greatly increase the use of applications because when you have to do 15 or 1500 in a day so that the rest of process which is completely automated can take over because you kill the week link in the chain.
This isn't a case of CLI is better than GUI. It is a case of CLI is easier to automate.
excle2csv foo.* | automated && echo Done.
You just can't do that with a GUI app. There are things that are easier with a GUI. But the basics (Save As file conversion being one of them) that should be available from the command line.
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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!
There is definitely a niche that needs to be filled (translation: make money here) -- pseudo-spreadsheets that generate best-fit curves for scientific publications. All of the more useful and intuitive applications such as GraphPad Prism, Sigmaplot, Kaleidagraph, and SlideWrite are (or were) applications developed in Windows and do not have Linux ports. These applications are geared towards non-math-centric researchers who need to generate good looking plots and line graphs without getting into the hard core formulae needed to do it. In other words, they don't want (nor have the time) to learn gnuplot, octave, Maple V, Mathematica to generate non-linear regression plots for biological data -- after all, they're not mathematicians, they're biologists.
As a grad student in biomedical sciences, this is one of the obstacles preventing me from working in Linux solely. I still need my laptop with XP because it still runs Excel and Prism, which I need to publish papers. I don't care about Excel all that much since it generates crappy plots anyway, what I would like to have is a Prism clone. Biomedical scientists are such an untapped demographic for Linux use -- these people would gladly migrate to Linux if all the applications they needed were available for Linux. All they care about is power and reliability -- both of which are fulfilled by Linux -- and a smattering of useful scientific applications. Linux has made leaps and bounds for scientists in the fields of physics, math, and engineering, and the next group of scientists it needs to concentrate on are the biologists.
Linux at home
- download gnumeric
- edit SHEET_MAX_ROWS in gnumeric.h
- compile