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Gnumeric Now Supports All Excel Worksheet Functions 319

Posted by timothy from the in-your-pipe-and-smoke-it dept.
A user writes "The latest beta release of Gnumeric has been released. According the the developers, it is now ready and stable enough for general use and deployment, and the final 1.2.0 release will be made on September 8th. This release also marks the realization of a major milestone -- all of the worksheet functions in the U.S. version of MS Excel are now supported. I have been using 1.1.19 for quite some time now, and it is incredibly fast, and hugely improved compared to Gnumeric 1.0."
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Gnumeric Now Supports All Excel Worksheet Functions More

Gnumeric Now Supports All Excel Worksheet Functions

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @05:30PM (#6774870)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • it could be very cool to support the sxc (openoffice) format. what about this ?

      Indeed. It's silly to have to use .xls format to move data between spreadsheets on Linux. On the other hand,
      OASIS [oasis-open.org] format is a lot more important strategically, at this point. But what the heck, we're spoiled, we want both, don't we.

      • Re:SXC vs XLS (Score:5, Informative)

        by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@gnom[ ]rg ['e.o' in gap]> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @08:30PM (#6775504) Homepage
        Its a question of resource allocation. For any time we spend polishing our xls import export we get access to the installed base of MS Office. Whereas time spent on OOo's formats yields a much smaller number. Given more resources we'd spend more time on it, but for now I threw together an importer in a couple of weekends, and have only received one bug report in 6 months. given the documentation for the OOo format, and more importantly the existance of readable code that impliments it, it would be a simple project for someone to improve our support.

    • Re:SXC ? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by KiwiSurfer ( 309836 ) <{james} {at} {pole.net.nz}> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @08:20PM (#6775480)
      Gnumeric 1.1.19 does support Openoffice's SXC file format. I discovered this by accident when I opened a SXC file instead of the XLS file I was going to open. The import filter isn't too bad for simple spreadsheets, but I would still use Excel's XLS fomat for transferring files between OOo and Gnumeric until the import filter improves. I think this is a positive step toward an OpenSource office enviroment to replace the present-day MS Office enviroment. - James
    • The 1.1.x tree can read sxc somewhat and will hopefully get an exporter for the format early in 1.3.

  • Bets? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Quasar1999 ( 520073 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @05:38PM (#6774924) Journal
    So how long before Microsoft chanages Excel to be totally incompatable with their old file format and/or functionality, just to screw the open source community yet again?

    It damn well will happen... It's just a matter of how long.

    • Re:Bets? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Narphorium ( 667794 )
      I can't see them doing this without signifigantly screwing over their own user base. Not that M$ is above screwing over their own users, but Excel and the rest of Office are big sellers and I'll bet they want to keep it that way.

      • Re:Bets? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by kfg ( 145172 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @06:08PM (#6775049)
        What do you think made me switch all of my business (and most of my personal) software from MS products to open source in the first place?

        I got really, really tired of chasing their arbitrary changes to Office that were clearly designed to make me purchase new licenses for products I already had.

        Years later I'm still a happy camper with Python, KDE, Open Office, MySQL and even vim.

        In my personal case MS was the best Linux "advocate" anybody could even want.

        KFG

    • Re:Bets? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gherald ( 682277 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @05:46PM (#6774970) Journal
      New versions of Excel are allways backwards compatible. In the event that something feature would need to be added to the .xls format, old versions of excel - and Gnumeric - would still be able to read everything else.

      Sort of like HTML... if a browser encounters a flag it is not familiar with, it just ignores it.
      • Eh? woudln't that be "forwards compatible"? Doesn't backwards compatible just mean that new versions of the software can still read the older format? So excel 9.1 (or whatever) can still read xls files from excel 5.1.

    • Re:Bets? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by localghost ( 659616 )
      Most people don't use the latest version of MS Office. The vast majority are on either 97 or 2K. They'd be screwing over the majority of their user base as well as the open source community. I doubt they really care about Gnumeric, since it doesn't compete directly with MS Office. OOo is more of a problem to them.

      • Re:Bets? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mbourgon ( 186257 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @09:53PM (#6775806) Homepage
        And? Screwing everyone over with the format makes money for Microsoft. I worked for a Fortune 500 corporation that wound up having to move to Office 97 - a few people got it and started passing around spreadsheets. We couldn't ban them for political reasons, and couldn't get everyone to save it down to 95. So... several months later, we moved to Office 97. I believe it was corporate-wide.

    • Re:Bets? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Xenoproctologist ( 698865 )
      Well, Office 2003 retails October 23rd. That a good date for you?

      Then again, since "XML" appears to be the Word Of The Day on the Office XP website, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

    • Re:Bets? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kenja ( 541830 )
      A good example of paranoia is when you think that people will do things that are detrimental to their own goals just to get you.

      • Re:Bets? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by mrscorpio ( 265337 )
        Just because you're paranoid...doesn't mean they're not after you.

        Microsoft has definitely done some questionable things in the past that don't seem to benefit anyone directly (including themselves), but certainly hurt the competition. I'll leave it up to someone else to post actual examples.

        Chris

      • Re:Bets? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by timeOday ( 582209 )
        Microsoft lock-in detrimental to Microsoft's goals? I think not. Are you familar with the phrase, "It's not done until Lotus 1,2,3 won't run."
    • If they change the format to be incompatible, that will probably won't buy them much time when OSS is incompatible, but then they're stuck with fully supporting the old format anyway. They can try to force upgrades to use the new format, but it will take many years to get rid of the files in the old format. In that time it just serves as a source of bloat and bugs in MS's software. That gives more reason to switch to an open format which is more consistant.

      I can dream, can't I?

    • Re:Bets? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@gnom[ ]rg ['e.o' in gap]> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @09:57PM (#6775818) Homepage
      They're somewhat stuck. The sheer mass of users for older versions of MS Excel limits their ability to change the format in any meaningful way. XL97 was the last time it changed at the core. The amount of shrieking between 95 and 97 was huge. This is one of the reasons Excel will very likely not support more than 256x64k for a long long time. Their file format would implode.

      I wouldn't be at all surprised if they have not considered it, but the opensource xls readers tend to be alot more resilient than MS in handling xls. We've had to code defensively sue to poor/missing docs. It will be hard for them to produce anything we (Gnumeric and OO) could not figure out pretty quickly, while still allowing XL97 to handle things.

  • Yes, but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by heneon ( 570292 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @05:38PM (#6774930)
    ...does it support the flight simulator too?
    If not, then I'm not interested, thank you!
    • A better question would be can I use it to read my E-mail? Who said that all software projects will continue development up until the point where you can use them to read you E-mail?

      Good work for gnumeric! Nice, fast, clean and actually useful.

  • Yeah, but... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by error502 ( 694533 )
    How long will this be true for? Excel 2003 is coming out soon.
    • I hope that Gnumeric compatability with Exel in Office 2003 will not be as much of an issue, this time around. There are many businesses that just won't buy it this time they have been burned 3 times already and that about says it! Site licensing the whole shebang will just not wash anymore. You can bet the Excel 2003 will have all sorts of wonderfull usefull clippy type add ons. Just imagine with excel you might even have something really usefull like dancing precision numbers that change when you run Wind
    • It will be true for a while.

      Then it won't be.

      What's your point?

  • But does it work the same? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @05:44PM (#6774960)
    Gnumeric Now Supports All Excel Worksheet Functions

    All functions, as defined by their list of functions, is somewhat different than Gnumeric working the same as Excell. For example, I would be amazed if the graphs embedded in spreadsheets and generated from the data look anything like they do in Excell; they certainly were not ever readable in the versions of Gnumeric I've used. Sure, they have a function that calls something that supposedly makes graphs, but the graphs just ain't right. And A.F.A.I.K. this function was on their "already working" list the last time I checked.

    I also want to see memos that I've attached to cells in my spreadsheet not vanish when imported into Gnumeric, as well as graphics embedded in a cell. Does anyone know if these now supposedly work?

    • Silly Rabbit (Score:3, Informative)

      by smittyoneeach ( 243267 )
      For example, I would be amazed if the graphs embedded in spreadsheets and generated from the data look anything like they do in Excell; they certainly were not ever readable in the versions of Gnumeric

      There is a vast difference between
      =Sum(A1:A10)
      And an Excel.Chart object.
      The beauty of Open Source is that, if you feel passionate about these features, you can light off CVS add them, and improve the net happiness of the user community.
    • "For example, I would be amazed if the graphs embedded in spreadsheets and generated from the data look anything like they do in Excell; they certainly were not ever readable in the versions of Gnumeric I've used."

      You make a very very good point that I like to harp on a lot. As far as working with numbers and text, just about any MS alternative spreadsheet is just as good. Graphics are where they ALL fall short. It is just so much easier to graph in Excel. Not only that, but Excel spreadsheets and gra

      • I agree completely. None of this says that Gnumeric and the other free spreadsheets are not fantastic tools. But when the pro Gnumeric fanatics start claiming Gnumeric Now Supports All Excel Worksheet Functions and then resort to name calling and suggesting that one should not call attention to a questionable claim because they paid nothing for the spreadsheet, they realy show their childishness and make the open source movement (which I support and promote) look bad.
        • I do not claim that Gnumeric supports all of MS Excel's functionality, and I won't until I feel its true and release gnumeric-2.0. The specific statement was
          '100% of MS Excel's worksheet functions'

          eg =SUM, =VARP, =ODDFPRICE etc

          and that is true (although we have recently found some references to a few functions specific to the asian version of MS Excel that we'll have to add). However, for today we support every function in the North American version of XL plus about 80 more.
      • I'd like to address two issues here.

        1) Gnumeric's charting abilities have historically been pathetic (I wrote the guppi wrapper so I'm allowed to tell it like it is). Guppi was a nice piece of work, with lots of fantastic features. None of which were visible to a Gnumeric-1.0.x user. Please do not judge us by that.

        2) MS Excel's charting IMHO sucks badly. It is definitely the weakest part of their product. Which makes (1) hurt even more. There are definitely projects out there that already make data
    • For example, I would be amazed if the graphs embedded in spreadsheets and generated from the data look anything like they do in Excell;

      Do you really care if it's identical or not? The graphs are already good. If you need really fancy graphs, just use the free DX package, which does 3D, topographical and all that. The rest of Gnumeric works just the same as M$ junk except it's stable. Quit raining on the parade, this is great news.

      I used to be a big Excel user, and thought it was the only thing Microso

    • Re:But does it work the same? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@gnom[ ]rg ['e.o' in gap]> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @08:39PM (#6775535) Homepage
      I do not claim that Gnumeric supports 100% of the features in MS Excel. That will not be until version 2.0 ('aka Extend') which I'd like to see go out within the next year. The language in the release notes was very explicit

      "100% of the worksheet functions"

      That refers only to the functions callable from expressions in cells.

      The Gnumeric team has been fairly anal about never claiming to support a feature that was not complete. Our Charting engine has long been a source of pain that never quite managed to find its niche. Which is what has delayed the 1.2 release for almost a year. Our new engine is targetted explititly at supported a superset of MS Excel's charting so that, like the rest of Gnumeric, things look just right when you import from xls. I've spent time ensuring that things are practically pixel perfect given the right fonts.

      We've supported reading and writing cell comments (memos) from xls95 for years. 1.1.20 adds that capability for 97/2k/XP too. Not sure what you mean by 'graphics embedded in a cell'. Please file a bug report with more details and we can keep track of the request.
  • ...it has all the functions which everybody ignored in Excel.

  • VBA (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Manhigh ( 148034 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @05:50PM (#6774978)
    Worksheet functions are great, but a lot of Excel's draw comes from its embedded VBA. Companies that rely on workbooks with embedded VBA probably wont be willing to switch to Gnumeric until it has support for VBA, or something very similar.

    • Re:VBA (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Micah ( 278 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @06:21PM (#6775106) Homepage Journal
      I agree. VBA is very, very useful.

      OpenOffice does support something very similar (though not code compatible).

      Gnumeric, AFAIK, has hooks to control it through Python scripts. That's a start, but I don't know that the Python code can be embedded in a spreadsheet. If it can't, they should work on that. Embedding Python code in a spreadsheet would kick butt! Python has VBA beat by a light year.

      • Re:VBA (Score:5, Informative)

        by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@gnom[ ]rg ['e.o' in gap]> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @10:22PM (#6775870) Homepage
        True, this has been a sticking point for our scripting support. We have not wanted to commmit to a scripting interface that would not allow VBA to be used out of the box. There are several issues with that

        1) security.
        There is absolutely no way in hell that we'll allow vba to run without some sort of sandbox and user intervention to explicitly enable the macros. This will definitely make life more difficult, but perpetuating the nightmare of vba viruses in office docs seems like a terrible idea.

        2) Reading and writing the macros. Unlike xls, the vba streams have no public documentation as far as I know. The anti-virus folk appear to have some under various NDAs but I have not seen enough to get a good handle on things. OO and gnumeric can both extract the compressed source code out of the vba streams, but neither of us has a good way of ensuring that will work.

        3) In an ideal world we'd be able to extract the p-code rather than the vba source code. That will enable a simple mapping from vba to a more more opensource friendly language like python. The precompiled p-code would remove the need to parse actual vba.

        4) If we're actually forced to use VBA, I'm hoping the mono's vb support will be viable as a fall back.

        However, even if we find the file format, and we have an interpretter. Supporting it will require a gnumeric scripting api that supports the entire XL api. A large and daunting task. We'll do something smaller and cleaner first, likely based on our experiments in python. To date we've avoided blessing any scripting api because we don't want to offer one api then pull the rug out from under people and change it. An API needs to be stable to be useful. This is high on our list of projects for 1.3.

        • Re:VBA (Score:3, Insightful)

          by TomV ( 138637 )
          I'm hoping the mono's vb support will be viable as a fall back

          Mono would give you VB.net, not VBA. But that might be a boon not a bad thing. You might get more than just a Fallback from Mono. First impression, without knowing the ins and outs in depth, just a brainstorm-grade idea: it seems to me that as .net becomes more widespread, and especially with the 'Visual Studio for Office' or whatever it's called this week, we're likely to see third-party tools to 'upgrade your existing office VBA macros to
    • I have a pretty big Excel spreadsheet (4.5MB empty, with about 10,000 lines of VBA code) which I spent about 200 hours doing. I started it on Excel 97, and carried and enhanced it to Excel XP at this point. Problem is now that it only runs on Windows (Macs support some VBA but it's limited). I've been looking at alternatives, translation to other formats, but I seem to have only one option at this point: I'll need to rewrite all the code if I want some portability.

      Now, the question is in what do I rewrite.
    • I'd like to see more integration of standard OSS scripting languages in Linux "Office" programs. I've lately fell in love with PHP and some of the cool variations particularly PHP-GTK. All the goodnes of two OSS projects together. It basicly acts like a mini-VB. Anyway, I digress. Why does everyone try to implement their own "scripting" language for every program? With Perl, Python, PHP, Java, & JavaScript [hey, everyone has access to them sillies] why won't more people use them as the scripting to

  • Hope it does a better job. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by crovira ( 10242 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @05:54PM (#6774997) Homepage
    The functions to calculate integrals (need that to calculatr bond rates,) sucked big time in Excell. Insufficient precision.

    If you're working on a multi-million dollar, long-term bond that comes to quite a bit of change dropped betwen the cracks.

    • Re:Hope it does a better job. (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The functions to calculate integrals (need that to [calculate] bond rates,) sucked big time in [Excel]. Insufficient precision.

      If you're working on a multi-million dollar, long-term bond that comes to quite a bit of change dropped betwen the cracks.

      If you're working on a multi-million dollar,long-term bond and using Excel you should have your degree and CPA status revoked.

    • Re:Hope it does a better job. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Odin's Raven ( 145278 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @07:22PM (#6775292)
      The functions to calculate integrals (need that to calculatr bond rates,) sucked big time in Excell. Insufficient precision.

      If you're working on a multi-million dollar, long-term bond that comes to quite a bit of change dropped betwen the cracks.

      Actually, Microsoft Excel sweeps those cracks every evening, and any loose change it finds is transferred to a secret compartment in your Microsoft Wallet. Then the next time you use your Microsoft Passport to access your Microsoft Hotmail account, Excel quickly grabs this money from your Wallet and tucks it into the back of your Passport, where it's slipped to the Microsoft Agent program that inspects your credentials.

      You've all heard how Office products are one of the two main revenue sources for Microsoft. You didn't actually think all that revenue just came from sales, did you? ;-)

      • Actually, Microsoft Excel sweeps those cracks every evening, and any loose change it finds is transferred to a secret compartment in your Microsoft Wallet.

        Finally, we've got something to nail Billy Gates on! For this. he's not going to some white collar resort prison. No, no, no! He's going to federal POUND ME IN THE ASS prison!

    • Did that happen in Superman 3 or something?

    • Re:Hope it does a better job. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@gnom[ ]rg ['e.o' in gap]> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @08:56PM (#6775584) Homepage
      In addition to supporting a superset of their worksheet functions, we're also significantly more accurate and stable numericly. With luck I'll have a 3rd party evaluation confirming that within the next few weeks.

  • oh the irony (Score:3, Funny)

    by rzei ( 622725 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @06:10PM (#6775060)
    i can see a Microsoft ad right below the news :)

  • I've been following gnumeric for a few years now, and I think that it is one of the best OSS projects available currently.

    OTOH, OpenOffice spreadsheet works perfectly fine for me for what I use it for ...
    • I've been following gnumeric for a few years now, and I think that it is one of the best OSS projects available currently.

      I have to agree there. Once it got stable, a little after 0.30 I think, it got really useful. I found the data import from ascii files particularly useful for various ad hoc benchmarking things I've had to do.

  • Gnumeric is irrelevant (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 23, 2003 @06:36PM (#6775144)
    Even if it does some things better than Openoffice, it doesn't have a fraction of the momentum, the public visibility. It's kind of like Linux vs. *BSD. Gnumeric will continue to have its niche users, but will always be far behind Openoffice in user count.

    And even on technical merit, Gnumeric is behind in some important aspects, Excel file compatibility the most dire one.

    • Re:Gnumeric is relevant (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@gnom[ ]rg ['e.o' in gap]> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @10:44PM (#6775926) Homepage
      Our stated goal in the Gnumeric project is to produce the best spreadsheet available. After some consideration we decided that Gnumeric seems likely to produce that sooner than OpenCalc. OO is an important project, but as a spreadsheet user I have little interest in an office suite. There are quite a few users out there that seem to have similar views.

      This is not a winner take all situation. OOo is the right solution for some users. However, Gnumeric is better is several areas already and with some work, we'll move past Excel in more places too.

      If you want an Office Suite, by all means use OO. If you want the best possible spreadsheet I'm guessing that people will end up using Gnumeric.

  • Bugs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RonnyJ ( 651856 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @06:50PM (#6775194)
    What happens if some of these functions don't quite work identically to Excel's in 0.1% of cases, be it for a bug in Excel or Gnumeric? I don't see much rush for converting existing work to Gnumeric, just because of this risk factor.

    • Re:Bugs? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@gnom[ ]rg ['e.o' in gap]> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @09:03PM (#6775601) Homepage
      It varies. We have a fairly extensive test suite that tries to keep us compatible with MS Excel for the most part. When a discrepancy appears there are 3 possibilities

      1) Gnumeric bug which we fix.
      2) Better precision in Gnumeric. This is fine. People tend to prefer the right answers when they can be convinced that XL was being silly. eg our VAR, HYPERGEOM, and various financial routines.
      3) There is a bug in XL. This is a royal pain in the butt.
      We end up with 2 functions. The XL 'FOO' that attempts to be bug compatibile, and a fixed G_FOO. We don't get a choice here. People tend to freak out if their imported spreadsheet starts to produce different results. Hopefully in time they can be convinced to use the G_ variants by default.

      However, this is definitely an area we take very seriously. The Gnumeric project has received a grant to produce a test suite for open source spreadsheets. I'll announce more details shortly.

  • Let's hear it for the tool chain (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 23, 2003 @06:54PM (#6775206)
    Gnumeric owes a lot to the symbiotic relationship of all the GNU software. I'm amazed by the quality and power of Gnumeric. Yet, this is only possible because the GNU compilers and support libraries have matured and improved drmatically.

    Linux started with GNU gcc version 1.37. Wow, does that seem like a long time ago. There was not even a working curses library at the beginning. Only stuff which relied on the standard C libary could be made to work, and not even all of that.

    So while this Gnumeric milestone deserves a "hats off" to all the wizards on the Gnumeric team, let's not forget all those who over the years toiled away at improving the GNU toolchain -- compilers, linkers, libraries, debuggers, and all those who worked to make XFree86 as stable as it is today. They layed the groundwork for Gnumeric and all the great software to come.

  • Gnumeric on Windows? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by leereyno ( 32197 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @06:54PM (#6775209) Homepage Journal
    From the graphing functions to its statistical capabilities, I consider Gnumeric to be on part with Gimp itself as an example of the quality that the Open Source model can create.

    Any idea whether there is a windows version? Now that would be a good idea. I don't know why there isn't more work Open Source development being done for windows. How about giving Microsoft their own taste of "embrace and extend" by using Open Source on Windows as a means of reaching those who aren't likely or able to move over to Linux? I for one was VERY glad to see that Gimp had been ported to windows. I kept getting asked by windows users if there was a good alternative to Photoshop and now I can finally say yes without qualifying my answer with "but it only runs on Unix."

    Microsoft isn't nearly as afraid of Linux as it is of the Open Source / Free Software movement/model itself. The technical quality of Microsoft's products is often lackluster, but when it comes to business strategy its leaders are grand-masters. They'll bankrupt you using an inferior product nine times out of ten. So far open source products like Linux have frustrated their ambitions to move up into the enterprise server arena but that isn't the same as going after them in their own backyard. Linux CAN be every bit as useful as a desktop OS as anything Microsoft or Apple has to offer, but it isn't quite there yet. Soccer moms and secretaries simply aren't going to move over to Linux because it isn't what their computers ship with and it isn't what everyone else is using. It also requires a degree of technical acumen that almost no-one posesses. The same is true of Windows of course, but that doesn't work against it since it's already in the dominant position. Those of use who do posess skill and talent with computers often forget just how mysterious the things that seem obvious to us are to most people. That is why Linux is stuck in the server room and will be for the forseeable future. If we can't displace Windows on the desktop, why not use it against its masters? Imagine if all the open-source application work that has been done for Unix was targeted at windows as well? Everyone who owned a computer would be using open source software in some capacity, and many would be aware of it. This would make it much easier to move people off of windows onto something better.

    Before this movement to something better can occur however Linux needs to be made more luser friendly. Before you can sell something to someone you have to show how it is better than what they are already using and how what they are using is detrimental to them in some way that the replacement is not. Just making a better mousetrap isn't good enough when your potential customers have already invested in another model. Your mousetrap has to kill more mice AND include a feature whereby human fingers will never be smashed by it accidentally. Right now Linux is comparable to Windows as a desktop os in most ways. It needs to be better than windows and not plagued by the problems that windows is burdened with, or at least those problems that end-user clueless types consider to be important. Creating end-user apps for the platform where our end-users are is the very best way I can think of to gain insight into what they consider to be important. By ignoring windows as a platform for open-source development we're only helping Microsoft keep the barrier to use of Open-Source products artificially high.

    Lee

    • Re:Gnumeric on Windows? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@gnom[ ]rg ['e.o' in gap]> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @09:08PM (#6775622) Homepage
      Soon.

      This is something I've been working towards for a while now. It will hopefully happen some time early in the 1.3 development cycle. Having a win32 build (and ideally an osx build too) is a very important for the next stage of migration. People migrating to linux will use an app that is compatible, but they're alot more likely to be allowed to use it by central management if it will run on windows too. This is one of the key difference between abiword and Gnumeric. Their community has been bolstered alot by the infusion of windows users and developers.

      If anyone is interested in helping with this its largely just a build monkey issue. The underlying libraries are available for win32 (the gtk stack). All we're lacking is someone with the time to patch the last of the build problems, and point out any lingering non portable calls.

  • the gnome logo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Snorp ( 63417 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @06:57PM (#6775214) Homepage
    For christ's sake, slashdot, GNOME has had a new logo forever. Can you please update it?

  • Function Benchmarks? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by StandardCell ( 589682 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @07:43PM (#6775369)
    I'm curious to see how Gnumeric performs in terms of its implementation of certain complex functions, such as Solver. Anyone know where we can dig this information up?

    • Re:Function Benchmarks? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@gnom[ ]rg ['e.o' in gap]> on Saturday August 23, 2003 @10:51PM (#6775938) Homepage
      We have tests for accuracy. Speed tends to be more of a 'hmm this is too slow for my taste lets see why' sort of operation. Gnumeric-1.2 is damn fast compared to 1.0, and is easily faster than OOo.

      However, I'm not clear on what you're looking for in the context of the solver.
      1.1.x has goal seek, and several different optimization algorithms curtesy of various other projects (linear, integer, and non-linear). We're less concerned with XL compatility here (they suck badly). Nor is speed of paramount concern. It seems more important to produce accurate and stable results.

      Dunno what else to say. Try it out and bugzilla a report if you see a problem.

  • Ironic.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MrEnigma ( 194020 ) on Saturday August 23, 2003 @07:49PM (#6775396) Homepage
    I just tried out a copy of Office 2003.

    At work I use Office 2000, and use Excel a lot, etc.

    I was previously using XP (2002) at home, and I noticed that there wasn't anything added on to Excel, or really to anything, just made it more "prettier".

    The same is true with 2003, save Outlook which has been revamped.

    It seems as MS is insisiting on keeping the same things. I know there are things here ad there that are updated, but nothing that would make you want to upgrade over 2000, and that's pretty sad.

    • ... nothing that would make you want to upgrade over 2000, and that's pretty sad.

      Office 2000, XP, 2003? Is there even a compelling reason to go past Office 97 (other than the fact that you can't really buy it anymore, except maybe on ebay)?

    • There are a few differences, though they're well hidden. Using VBA to work on cell ranges, for example, is much easier and faster, in previous versions I had to implement very cpu-intensive loops. Not saying that the changes are earth-shattering, they're certainly not, and for 95% of people nothing that really matters to them. As for 2003 beta, Outlook has been changed in good ways, but since I've abandoned it for Thunderbird at home, and I mostly use OS X at work (w/ Outlook 2001, the Entourage support i

  • Copying Excel somewhat foolhardy (Score:3, Informative)

    by riptalon ( 595997 ) on Sunday August 24, 2003 @03:53PM (#6779149)

    While MS Excel may have an extensive array of features it is somewhat lacking on the accuracy front. At least as far back as Sawitski (1994) various scientific analyses have been critising Excel using phases like "can be judged inadequate" and "it can be deduced that Excel uses an unstable algorithm". However as McCullough & Wilson (1999) note Microsoft has done little to address these concerns. The problems Sawitski found in Excel 4 were still present in Excel 97 and Excel 2000 for that matter. In fact critisism of the accuracy of Excel 2002 and XP in the scientific literature continues e.g. McCullough & Wilson (2002).

    To quote the The Gartner Group, "Enterprises should advise their scientists and professional statisticians not to use Microsoft Excel for substantive statistical analysis". Of course if you do not need to do accurate statistical analysis then these problems will not effect you but given that Microsoft knows about and has largely ignored these problems and scientists are the people most likely to check that a given piece of software really does what if claims to do rather than using it blindly, it seems quite possible that similar problems exist in other parts of Excel but have yet to be exposed.

    Rather than blindly copying Excel, the Gnumeric team might do better by trying to bring on board some of these scientists who have been testing and critising Excel in order to improve the accuracy of Gnumeric, so that not only does Gnumeric beat Excel on features but also, and far more importantly, on accuracy. See the following links for more info on the problems with Excel, 1 [agresearch.cri.nz], 2 [practicalstats.com], 3 [orst.edu], 4 [npl.co.uk].

    • We're not copying implementations. The analytics in gnumeric are significantly more accurate than XL on all fronts, and we have quite a few that are not in MS Office. The point of this article is that gnumeric now provides a superset of the analytics in MS Excel. With luck we'll have a 3rd party review confirming this shortly.

      We're sharing quite a bit of code with R, and various solver libraries.

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