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

Let me be the first

[Apreche]

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.

Pfft

[Anonymous Coward]

50 bux for a spreadsheet app? I'll stick with the free Gnumeric instead.

Any bets..

[bugmenot]

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.

They left out Gnumeric

[Travis Fisher]

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.

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.

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[tashanna]

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.

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[XeRXeS-TCN]

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.

For scientific calculations, clones are useless

[stroustrup]

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??

Re:For scientific calculations, clones are useless

[Sweetshark]

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.

More sense

[barcodez]

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

Re:More sense

[Sique]

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.

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.

gnumeric is also very good

[frontloader]

i havent bothered to look at planmaker, but i use gnumeric [over OO.org] for spreadsheet work.. and it rocks the house.

besides.. :

tengu:/home/mschupp# apt-get install planmaker
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package planmaker

Re:Interesting....

[Tarantolato]

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.

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.

Shameless.

[Raven42rac]

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.

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:It's not free.

[Conor Turton]

The best stuff usually isn't.

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.

I don't care about Excel, what about OO

[OYAHHH]

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.

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....

[eyeye]

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.

No support for macros

[wytcld]

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.

Re:The Row Limit is Definitely Frustrating

[martin-k]

I've always wondered why this limit exists. If anyone can enlighten me about the technical reasons, that would be much appreciated.

Performance. We will increase PlanMaker's row limit (basically, the sky is the limit) once we have tweaked certain routines, like sorting and transposing.

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.

So you are using Excel as a database?

[RAMMS EIN]

``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.

Included with SUSE 9.1

[Roger Whittaker]

This (and the company's word processor, textmaker) are included in the boxed version of SUSE 9.1 Professional.

It works well for me

[Guenhwyvar]

I have some xls files that contain a several graphs that are generated from thousands of data points.

• Open Office takes 10 minutes or more to open them.
• Gnumeric opens them quickly but doesn't draw the graphs correctly.
• KSpread doesn't draw the graphs.

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.

MS Office Doesn't Stink

[BoomerSooner]

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.

Excel's power

[MoronGames]

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.

Re:CLI

[Jody Goldberg]

Gnumeric includes just that
ssconvert foo.xls foo.csv

Re:The Row Limit is Definitely Frustrating

[Jody Goldberg]

- download gnumeric
- edit SHEET_MAX_ROWS in gnumeric.h
- compile