Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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).
OpenOffice ran well enough on my P2/450Mhz system way back when. I would assume that by now they've made some kind of performance improvements to it too. Granted, it's not really what you would call "lightweight" but it'll get the job done, and it should be good performance-wise.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
I've also used OpenOffice on a low end machine (333mhz Windows NT 128MB/ram), and it ran just as well as Excel. I would suggest giving it a try.
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.
Linux From Scratch lists depends on its site, as well as build instructions: Gnumeric-1.2.10
It seems to depend on a bit of Gnome-ish things. But having some Gnome stuff isn't a bad idea, and you don't _NEED_ all of Gnome for it to work.
gnumerc is it, and everybody knows it. You don't have to have gnome in order to use it. But you do need GTK, which you have because you use abiword. And you have to have libgsf which has to be built with gnome support, but gnome itself is not really needed. If you use gentoo all this means is you have to put on the gnome use flag for just the libgsf package and gnumeric will work. You don't need to emerge gnome.
Is that clear enough? I hope you understand.
Hey, you can always use moodss, the module object oriented dynamic spreadsheet. Or you can use sc, which is curses based. But then, you might as well use visicalc.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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