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Gnumeric Turns 5 370

Posted by michael from the macros-still-not-supported dept.
Jody Goldberg writes "Five years ago, Miguel committed the first code for Gnumeric to CVS. In a testament to the quality of the code several lines are still in use. Since that time the project has grown to more than 300,000 lines and now supports all 325 worksheet functions in MS Excel, plus almost 100 more. This seemed like a good time to thank all the people who have contributed to Gnumeric over the years. We're about to start the run up to the the next stable release which will be out in a few weeks and we look forward to continuing work with GNOME, and the community at large to produce the most powerful spreadsheet in the world."
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Gnumeric Turns 5 More

Gnumeric Turns 5

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  • Gnumeric is great (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheLastUser ( 550621 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:06PM (#6369653)
    I use gnumeric all the time, I read MS xls files without any problems. Its also faster to start, and looks better, than OO (which I also like). Its my favorite of all of the Linux office apps.

    • Re:Gnumeric is great (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:27PM (#6369764)
      I absolutely agree. It is harder and harder to find a feature that I want to use that isn't there. The team seems to be focusing on the real beef of the application, making it really really good. Performance is a big priority too, try throwing a very very big spreadsheet at Gnumeric and you'll see how good it performs. And now that Graphs are (finally!!) getting there, there is very little reason to use another *nix spreadsheet.

      Great job Gnumeric team.

      congrats,
      a happy gnumeric user
      • It is harder and harder to find a feature that I want to use that isn't there.

        I can't remember who wrote the statistics add-ins for Excel (and I don't have a Windoze computer handy to find out) but that is one thing that would be very useful to me. Plus there is a range of plotting functions that are simply not there in Gnumeric, and I've been struggling along with Grace [weizmann.ac.il], which has a bit of a slow learning curve.. For all that, though, Gnumeric's a great product.

    • Security Question. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      TheLastUser,

      In your experience, can you comment on whether the Microsoft excel-format security flaws and macro virus exploits affect Gnumeric in any way? I am verry curious as to how Gnumeric implements an unstable Microsoft format without rendering some sort of security risk to a local user exploit.

      Thankyou.

      • Re:Security Question. (Score:3, Informative)

        by aurelien ( 115604 )
        Format, I don't know. But VB is not supported as a scripting language, so Gnumeric is imune to macro virus exploits.

      • Re:Security Question. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@@@gnome...org> on Friday July 04, 2003 @09:37PM (#6370277) Homepage
        There are two somewhat related issues to contend with.

        1) The file formats are semi documented. We have rough ideas of what OLE2, BIFF[5-8], and escher look like. There are however, lots of abiguities and question marks. As a result we have lots and lots of validation on what get imported. OOo does the same, which is why we can frequently crash MS excel when adding something new to the xls exporter, but still be able to read each others output.

        2) The format for VBA is undocumented a far as I know. OOo has a few guesses in place and I've started doing some research on it, but neither of us can even read the vba enough to worry about running macro viri.

        3) what scripting capabilities we do have (eg in python, perl, or guile) are strictly sandboxed. We are definitely tending to err on the side of caution rather than functionality.
    • Contrary to what have been advertised, there _are_ something that Excel does, that Gnumeric doesn't.

      For example, Gnumeric still doesn't do Pivot Table.

      While I do understand that Pivot Table isn't really a big deal to many, there are times that functions such as Pivot Table comes _very_ handy.

      Please, Gnumeric Developers, please put the Pivot Table on top of your "todo list".

      Thank you !

  • Several lines are still in use (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:07PM (#6369663)
    Comments with the authors name?
    • int main(int argc, char **argv) and ++i; come to mind too.

  • Most annoying 'feature' of MS Excel (Score:5, Interesting)

    by civilengineer ( 669209 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:08PM (#6369668) Homepage Journal
    I use MS Excel almost everyday for data analysis, and the most annoying part is that number of records cannot exceed 65536 in Excel. Anyting larger than that, we need to get the data into Access and work in it, and that's not very fast and easy. What's the limit in Gnumeric?

  • OpenOffice (Score:5, Interesting)

    by k-hell ( 458178 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:08PM (#6369672)
    How does Spreadsheet in OpenOffice perform against Gnumeric in terms of functions, compatibility with other spreadsheet programs ect?

  • Really? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nepheles ( 642829 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:10PM (#6369683) Homepage

    This project could do with some marketing. I genuinely had no idea that it was even comparable to Excel in terms of features, and I'm no Linux n00b. One of the problems with OS software in general, I guess. And what has to change.

  • Interesting Software (Score:2, Insightful)

    by noldrin ( 635339 )
    One of the things that have attracted me to Linux and GNU software in general have been interesting software such as Gnumeric. I hope the new office packages such as Open Office and K Office don't push out this type of software.

    If Linux and GNU are going to get big, they have to innovate and write better software, not just emulate what the big guys are doing.

    I want an office where I can use whatever software I want for each function, not what others decide to be in a suite.

  • What are some of the extra 100 functions? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:11PM (#6369692) Homepage
    I'm curious what was added beyond what is offered by Excel. Any really interesting little tidbits?

  • Plotting (Score:3, Insightful)

    by starseeker ( 141897 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:13PM (#6369701) Homepage
    guppi is OK, but I really wish they would port the guts of something like Grace over to Gnumeric. One of the things MS did correctly on Excel was decent graphing, and I would like to see Gnumeric use some really powerful plotting tools from the open source world (scigraphica might be easier to incorporate) and take that to the next level.

    Oh - is there any way to keep the scroll bar from reflecting the fact that there are 65000 rows or whatever in a sheet? It really limits the use of the scroll bar.
    • Use gnuplot [gnuplot.info].

      • Re:Plotting (Score:3, Informative)

        by samhalliday ( 653858 )
        oh dear oh dear, someone ALWAYS says it.. but gnuplot is not, err, GNUplot. if you know what i mean. it was started way in the early eighties and the name GNU is meerly a coincidence. the license is "open source", but it is by no means a license which allows the use of the code elsewhere in the world.

        also, gnuplot is VERY hard to get it to look good. its the best, but it is really the graphing equivalent of LaTeX. you will never get that quality form a WYSIWYG graph program. havign said that, i so really th

        • Re:Plotting (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Mr Z ( 6791 )

          I recently integrated a macro preprocessing engine written in C++ into an ancient, pre-ANSI-C assembler that I didn't write. :-)

          At least language wise, those two languages are just close enought to be dangerous. The styles were completely different. But I was able to integrate them by keeping the modularity sane.

          To integrate something like gnuplot into gnumeric, they'd have to work on keeping the interface small, well defined, but still large enough to support all the desired functionality. Not

      • Or use R [r-project.org] . . I find it better than Gnuplot.

    • One of the things MS did correctly on Excel was decent graphing

      I'm sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with that one. I last really used a spreadsheet for serious graphing purposes about 6 years ago, using Quattro Pro (which came with Corel PerfectOffice) on Windows 95.

      It had more flexible (and better-looking) graphing functions that Excel still can't touch, and was a damned sight cheaper too (I paid $90 at the time).

      I'd say that Excel graphs like Pico edits text, but that's unfair to Pico.

  • 5 years old code? Huh (Score:5, Funny)

    by johnkp ( 178178 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:27PM (#6369770)
    Five years ago, Miguel committed the first code for Gnumeric to CVS. In a testament to the quality of the code several lines are still in use

    It's nothing. As a testament to the quality of the Windows sourcecode they keep seleral lines of code back from the early eighties in active use.

  • ORBit Perl automation (Score:5, Informative)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:28PM (#6369774)
    It's not quite ready for prime-time yet, but this [redhat.com] is getting closer to being able to code your macros in Perl.

  • Missing Component? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by __past__ ( 542467 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:43PM (#6369845)
    Gnumeric is OK, but where is the VBA equivalent?

    I'm serious. People in the Windows world use Excel not only to calculate stuff, but as some kind of application platform. Personally I think that's stupid in most cases, but not offering it is even worse.

    Maybe I just couldn't find it anywhere, but: Is Gnumeric easily scriptable? It doesn't have to be Excel or VBA compatible (in fact, about every other language would be better, IMHO), it doesn't need an integrated IDE with debugger etc. like Excel has, but the only thing I could find so far is a "plugins" directory containing .so files - that can't be it. Is there something better, and if so, why the f**k isn't it documented prominently?

    • but not offering it is even worse.

      Why is it worse?

      If you don't give the option to people to do something that (by your own assessment) is stupid, perhaps they'll be less lazy and do things properly.

      A spreadsheet is a self-contained application - you can provide entry fields, and recalculate - that should be the limit of it.

      I've seen several 'Excel applications', and they all suck.

      Horses for courses, and screw the lazy developer.

    • A few years ago I wrote a fairly complex spreadsheet (a simulation of the Monty Hall problem) with some Excel Macro/VBA functionality. My memory on this is a bit fuzzy, so I could be wrong, but I believe I tested it under Star Office and possibly Gnumeric as well to see if it ran, and I seem to recall it did.

      Interested parties could test:

      http://weston.canncentral.org/misc/Monty/GameSh o wF inal2.xls

      Some background can be found here [canncentral.org], if you're not familiar with the problem. The Workbook has one sheet for p

    • Extending Gnumeric (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@@@gnome...org> on Friday July 04, 2003 @10:41PM (#6370526) Homepage
      We tend to split extension into 2 areas

      1) writing functions. Which is supported and documented in python, perl, and guile (and of course compiled languages)

      2) scripting. Which is currently unfinished and intentionally mostly undocumented. There are some experimental bindings for python, but we have not had the time to select a solid enough api that we could commit to it. Gnumeric tries to under promise features, and I don't want to whip out some half baked api. The 1.3 development cycle will target scripting and we'll likely wrap the selected api in python, perl and corba initially.

      We could use some help on this.

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Does anyone know if there's any work going on to port GTK/GNOME apps like Gnumeric to Mac OS X, in a standalone fashion? (ie so they don't need X11)

      Right now there isn't a free office suite for OS X that doesn't run under X11 and hence look like donkey, though there's apparently an unreleased beta of a native KOffice that uses Trolltech's new Mac OS X native QT toolkit.

      I disagree with your 'donkey' comment, completely. My mac is themed as close to Next as I can get it, and with apple X11, it's hardly d

    • A truely native port is possible, would be alot of work. I'd rather see a native version of gtk+ for OSX. That would help alot more projects.

      How far are the various ports from being usable ? I've heard that film-gimp has been working on gtk-1.2, but have not researched it. Are there any gtk2 efforts in the works ?

  • Desktop-specific afiliation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thelandp ( 632129 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @07:48PM (#6369862)
    Okay this may be a little off-topic, but Gnumeric is a perfect example of what this comment is about.
    I'm concerned that so open source apps written these days have names that demonstrate their affiliation with a particular desktop. Having names that begin with "gn" of "K" is a kind of flag waving that shows which desktop application framework was used (gnome or KDE).
    Ideally the user should be able to (and usually can) run apps using either framework on any desktop. But when the name has "gn" for example, are they saying "well yes you could probably run it in KDE but it's a gnome app so maybe you're better off running it in gnome..."
    Why is their so much tribalism? I think it's an important step in the maturity of Linux or Open Source in general to get to a point where the particular implementation (gnome or KDE) of any given layer (the desktop) has NO impact on other layers (the application) and so the title of the app should not even need to provide any hint of affiliation with a particular brand of in another layer.

    Happy Birthday Gnumeric, looks like a great program. But as a user I don't think I should need to know about it's internal implementation thanks.

    • It's my understanding (I'm sure lots of people will correct me if I'm wrong) that you can't necessarily just compile->run apps between desktops.

      If I recall correctly, it has to do with the gnome desktop using c/GTK bindings, while the KDE desktop uses c++/QT bindings.

      • Re:Desktop-specific afiliation (Score:4, Informative)

        by dozer ( 30790 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @08:12PM (#6369950)
        It's true that Gnome apps use GTK and KDE apps use Qt. However, GTK and KDE interoperate extremely well thanks to the efforts of freedesktop.org [freedesktop.org].

        It may surprise you to hear that you do not even need to run a Gnome or KDE to use their applications. I'm running a blessedly clean IceWM setup and I still get to use Evolution.

      • It's my understanding (I'm sure lots of people will correct me if I'm wrong) that you can't necessarily just compile->run apps between desktops.

        Consider yourself corrected. That's completely wrong.

        As long as you have the required libraries installed you can run gnome or kde apps with or without the gnome or kde desktop crap. I've used both regularly under Windowmaker, IceWM, etc. without using their desktops at all. On debian or gentoo your installation command will automatically grab the required li

      • Bullshit. Pure, simple, bullshit.

        Yes, gnome and kde use different widget libraries. Applications designed for the gnome desktop rely (IIRC) on the gtk libraries and KDE apps rely on the qt libraries. However, the kde and gtk libraries co-exists, so as long as you have the underlying libraries installed, gnome apps should run under a kde desktop and kde apps should run under a gnome desktop. In fact, I use gnumeric as my spreadsheet program and evolution as my e-mail client despite the fact that I use
    • You can always run all Gnome apps on a KDE desktop and vice versa. You can also run them on twm, or use a plain XLib app with any desktop. That's great.

      There are several desktop platforms, and there will always be, because they have different goals (KDE tries to make the desktop as slow and space-wasting as possible, while Gnome's goal is to remove as many useful configuration options as it can while avoiding cross-app integration ;-). Has never been different, will always be that way. Only that, thanks t

    • well, you do need gnome installed to use it... bonobo and all. it's not just gtk.
    • I dunno. Sounds interesting on the front of it, but I certainly don't agree. First, gnumeric does run perfectly well under my KDE desktop. Second, if the developers did it for the glory of Gnome, then so be it; they are free to call it whatever they want. Now I've purchased a few RedHat and Mandrake distributions but have never sent anything to the Gnome foundation itself (something I hope to remedy in a month or so). If they want to call their excellent program ElephantAss I'm certainly not going to argue.
    • I personally stay away from the K* apps because I don't want the bloat^ of the QT/KDE libraries installed in addition to the GTK/GNOME libraries. I've been happily using linux for years without ever having to use a KDE app (and thus install the associated libraries) and barring something groundbreaking, I expect it will stay that way for a long time.

      Thus the G*/K* naming convention is handy for me. I don't need to download a couple meg pile of source code only to find out that it's a QT/KDE app when I try

  • Looks great, why not for Windows too? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MadCow42 ( 243108 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @08:03PM (#6369919) Homepage
    It looks like a great replacement for Excel... why not make it buildable on Windows too?

    I know that half the point of creating great desktop apps for Linux is to encourage the use of Linux on the desktop, but it also limits the usage (and therefor usage and availability of developer support too) of the product.

    These days, there's almost no technical limitation to writing code that can be compiled on multiple platforms. Usually the limitation is the UI toolkit (gee, like Gnome?), but there are many cross-platform ones available too (like Tcl/Tk, etc.)

    MadCow.
  • I really wish there was more consolidation in the OSS world. It would be nice if the Gnumeric developers could spend their time making OpenOffice calc even better. Gnumeric may be good, but OpenOffice will be what the vast majority uses in the future...
  • autofill doesn't understand how to fill two dimensions. autofill doesn't replace entries. Give me manual fill-right and fill-down any day.

    Also dragging cells doesn't always figure out how to change the functions correctly.

    excel is much better in these respects.
  • ...for example, like

    int main(int argc, char** argv)
    {

    and even

    }

    at the end??

    Not sure whether the choice of 'several' was just incompetence or failed sarcasm. Either way, it sure made my day :).

  • Gnumeric doesn't support Open/StarOffice format (Score:4, Interesting)

    by squashed ( 664265 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @08:14PM (#6369959)
    Gnumeric is significantly faster for certain types of spreadsheet applications. I'd be happier if I could pick and choose among Open/StarOffice and Gnumeric. The best tool for the best job.

    However, while they both support all sorts of Windows formats and predecessor Linux formats (OLEO, e.g.), they don't support each other's file format!

  • What's a good way to create charts (simple scatter plots) from data in a CSV file? Gnumeric just runs the CPU up to infinity when I try to create a chart with 10000 points. Any tips? Right now I have to use Excel :(
  • Feel free to mod me down, but working with
    really large spreadsheets in Gnumeric is
    a pain; it's way too slow. Reading in a tab-delimited
    file with 12 columns and 40,000 rows takes minutes
    (this is microarray data). I have compared
    Kspread, Gnumeric, StarOffice, OpenOffice, even
    Siag (scheme in a grid). They are all substantially
    slower in than MS Excel ... For this kind of
    work, I'm afraid I really see myself forced to
    work with Excel (which, incidentally, runs
    fine in Crossover Office; this is what I use on a
    daily

    • Text import in 1.0.x was slow (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@@@gnome...org> on Friday July 04, 2003 @10:27PM (#6370487) Homepage
      Please don't judge all of gnumeric based on the text import in 1.0.x. There have been lots of performance improvements and enhancements there in the development series. The core of gnumeric is easily capable of handling that magnitude of data. Try 1.2.x when it comes out next month (or even 1.1.x if you want to help beta things).

      MS Excel is still somewhat faster mainly due to its memory foot print. It was written back in the day and bit bashes things all over the place. Gnumeric pays a penalty for using 32bit addresses rather than bit bashing 18.

      If you have something that performs badly please _tell_ us. Our goal is to produce the best damn spreadsheet around. This is still version 1.1, 2.0 (extend) and 3.0 (extinguish) aren't due for a while yet.
  • Or at least mods for it? I don't like to use decimal.

  • Still looking for decent charting app (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vrmlguy ( 120854 ) <samwyse&gmail,com> on Friday July 04, 2003 @09:06PM (#6370140) Homepage Journal
    For the last couple of weeks, I've been looking for a charting application that's the equal of MS Excel. In particular, I have trending data where the X axis has to be dates, and I want to create .PNG images for use in a web-based application. So far, everything sucks. I've been reduced to trying to add date formating to plotutils, which isn't too easy.

    Gnuplot seems pretty good, but isn't a GNU app (as I understand it, it semi-predates GNU) or much of an open source app. So GNOME feels that they can't use it and I don't want to use it for philosophical reasons.

    Everything else, as I've said, sucks. Guppi looks interesting , though. I can't seem to find out if there's any way to use it from an Apache server-side app. Anyone else know?

  • Is anyone aware of any spreadsheet apps that will run in the terminal?

    Other more off-the-radar spreadsheeting projects?

  • Gnumeric and non-English Excel (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Xolotl ( 675282 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @10:53PM (#6370571) Journal
    How well does Gnumeric handle xls files from non-English versions of Excel?

    In particular, the formulae in non-English versions of Excel are saved into the xls files using their non-English names - can Gnumeric cope with that? (This is totally brain dead behaviour, IMHO, - not only does it mean that an English Excel can't understand non-English files, but if the function name has a non-Latin 1 character in it and you don't have that font, then even if you have the right language version of Excel you still can't edit the formula, only run it! This kills sharing Excel spreadsheets internationally. Why, oh why didn't they use numeric codes in the file and translate?). [Disclaimer: I've seen this for Excel = v.97, haven't looked at newer versions.]

    As a side question, how does Gnumeric save formulae in its own-format files?

    I originally tried Gnumeric a long time ago, in v. 0.something, at the time it didn't have the functionality I needed. I shall certainly try it again. Thanks for all the hard work!

  • 99% perfect (Score:3, Interesting)

    by b17bmbr ( 608864 ) on Friday July 04, 2003 @11:20PM (#6370631)
    it is truly an awesome SS, except for one little thing. you can't formt the cells to have vertical text. the dialog box says unfinished. which says alot about OSS because ni commercial app would ever have that, but it still remains undone. i wish that one little thing would get done. if i was good enough i'd work on it, but i ain't. could some one please!!
  • I've tried alot of spreadsheet programs on both sides of the fence. Whilst taking a MS Excel course a few months ago, I wanted to use a free alternative and not a warez copy of Microsoft Office for obvious moral reasons. And I sure as hell wasn't going to pay for a copy! I've tried 602Tab, an Excel clone and part of the impressive 602 PC Suite [software602.com] for Windows, KDE's spreadsheet program (the word "kludgy" comes to mind) and OpenOffice which was so damn sluggish I gave it the ole make uninstall; make clean routin

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