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Nimble, Excel-Compatible Spreadsheets for *nix?
linguae writes "I'm running a FreeBSD desktop on a PC that has a 475MHz K6-2 processor with 64MB RAM. I use lightweight programs on my desktop such as Window Maker, AbiWord, and Firefox. I have been looking for a decent yet lightweight (and preferably Open Source) spreadsheet that is compatible with Excel, and also doesn't rely on dependencies such as GNOME or Java. I'm not an Excel power user, but sometimes I do have to share spreadsheets every now and then. I wonder if there is a spreadsheet equivalent of Abiword?"
Gnumeric is about as close as you're going to get.
It's really quite nice...
I'm not sure if it still has any gnome dependencies or not.
But really
abiWord:word::gnumeric:excel
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OpenOffice runs on my P1/150mhz system with 48 megs of RAM. It starts up a little slow (30 seconds or so) but once it's going, has no problems. You can do a custom install so that you can use only the spreadsheet program without taking up the HD space on the word processor and presenation programs.
Firefox is far from lightweight. It's a great program and all, but lightweight is the last word I'd use. Granted I don't use Windows, so maybe it's relative. I would say that Firefox is the single biggest resource sucking app I run on a regular basis. Not to mention it seems to have some sort of memory leak that makes me eventually have to close it (or it crashes).
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Spreadsheets/
... you ought to try it sometime....
An amazing tool google
OTOH Gnumeric and / or OOo would be a good place to start. OOo xls compatibility is very good in my experience. Havent used Gnumeric for a while last time (several yrs ago) its xls compatibility was a tad ropey - Im sure its improved by now though!
Nick
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Id there a reason whay you haven't tried Open/Star Office?
I've been happy using it for several months. If you're not involved in extremely complex spreadsheets it should work fine.
Three Squirrels
assert(expired(knowledge));
Ok, its not open source, but a globe-spanning company I used to work for did all of its office work with a unix office suite (CHUI interface!) called Cliq.
Don't know if its still available, used to be about 30 bucks US a seat. Had a nice spreadsheet program (which was probably the best part of the suite). Maybe they have an X version now, I haven't look at Cliq in about 3 years. URL for Cliq:
http://www.dr-quad.com/products.htm
HTH
This sig kills fascists.
So it doesn't have the major gnome dependencies, but it has a few.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
You're right, that would have been better, except that the box I ran it on is a mail server and doesn't have any gnome packages installed (or even X)
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Is it just me, or does Open Office write something into its Excel-formatted files that breaks the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel package on CPAN?
I find that some cells return the content type rather than the content when retrieving $cell->Value
(e.g., "GENERAL" rather than "foo", which is the cell contents).
If I use a spreadsheet saved from Excel it works; if I read it into OO, and save it out, I experience the problem.
This is under Perl 5.8.1mumble on Mac OS X.
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I'm generally a cautious person, and the bargain-basement price clenched the deal.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
I'm generally a cautious person, and the bargain-basement price clenched the deal.
If that's not sarcasm, then you're not cautious, you're gullible.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
The upcoming 1.4.0 release (due in the next few days) supports a --without-gnome configure time option that decreases functionality (no gnome-vfs means no direct http support), but still works nicely as a spreadsheet. We use this for our win32 port.
I use open office 1.9.58. Its just a developer snapshot build but the improvements in 2.0 makes switching very easy. In particular, right clicks now first sets focus to event target before opening contextual menu (similar to Excel). It also includes format painter which is a great tool if you spend much time making your spreadsheets look nicer.
If you are a hacker, Open Office also has language bindings to Java, Python, C++, JavaScript and many others so you can build some powerful applications and do things that is possible in Excel but the code would be very obfuscated and unreadable as is expected with M$ objects and VB API's.
I am a power user of spreadsheets being a heavy user of Lotus 123 back in the early 90's and was switched to excel 5.0 back in 94 I think.
OOO 2.0 looks extremely promissing and aparently they are putting in alot of performance improvements as well.
Just remember, these 2.0 snapshots are intended for developers and you may get crashes (Although since about 1.9.4n I have not had many at all).
JsD
How about DOSEmu running an old version of Lotus 1-2-3 or Quatro Pro? :-) Excel (with the proper file filters installed) can read and write to them, last I checked. And I can't imagine DOSEmu to be too resource intensive
But Gnumeric is a very good choice. Here is a detailed write up of Gnumeric. The Computational Statistics & Data Analysis Statistical Software Newsletter has a report reviewing Gnumeric vs MS-Excel titled Fixing Statistical Errors in Spreadsheet Software: The Cases of Gnumeric and Excel (Warning for PDF) Regardless, of which spreadsheet you use, it's worth a read. Some excerpts:
So, actually, Gnumeric *is* currently much better than MS-Excel. At least if the metrics are that it's statistical functions are more accurate and that bugs get fixed faster. I'd speculate that once Quattro was killed off, MS coasted on development of MS-Excel like it has done with MSIE after killing Netscape. Anyway...Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
AbiWord, Gnumeric, and GNOME-DB comprise all of GNOME Office. This is listed at http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/
Karma: Good, or bust!
I've found that Gnumeric's dependencies make it pretty much impossible to keep Gnumeric fully up to date. I imagine this isn't a concern if you're using debian-unstable or something, and constantly updating to the newest version of GNOME.
The dependency that sticks in my mind while I was trying to keep Gnumeric up to date on SuSE is "libgsf", but that might be because that's where the trouble always started. I probably would have had more problems if I'd managed to resolve that. Is there some way to make static binaries or something with the newest libraries, without removing the older libraries and breaking all sorts of annoying dependencies?
You gotta wonder why having the newest version of stuff like libgsf, down the the hundredth of a version number, is so important to each and every version of Gnumeric.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
How about the original? Visicalc.
You can download it from Dan Bricklins website and run it under dosemu. It run under WindowsXP on my system. As far as light goes it is only 27k!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I know this isn't the answer you want. I know Gnumeric & OOo Calc are the answers you're going to get.
But seriously, have you thought about getting a bit more RAM? SuSE7.3 w/ KDE and Calc from OOo PR1 runs cleanly - SURPRISINGLY well - on a PPro 200 with 128 MB of RAM. Starting applications, including those, is slow. Of course, it is also running softRAID on 5400rpm drives - in PIO, not DMA - and being a SAMBA & netatalk file server, among other things. Since you said you're from BSD - SuSE is not renowned for being a "lite" installation, either.
I've definitely heard Gnumeric is better from a small-footprint POV.
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