Gnumeric Now Supports All Excel Worksheet Functions 319
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."
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SXC ? (Score:3)
Indeed. It's silly to have to use
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)
Where's the Pivot Table ? (Score:3, Interesting)
But where's that Pivot Table function that not only Excel had, but also Lotus Agenda ?
Re:Where's the Pivot Table ? (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC, pivot tables are "functionality", not a "function". Functions are those things that look like: =foo(a,b,c)
Re:SXC ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SXC ? (Score:2)
123 files (Score:5, Informative)
If anyone is interested please contact me.
Re:This is a blatant DMCA violation. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thankfully there's not much to worry about here. A few years ago MS published a series of 'MS Excel developer's kit' books. There wasn't much in the way of useful material so for actaully developing extensions to MS Excel available. So, as far as I can tell, Microsoft tried to pad the book with what it figured was some marginally interesting filler, a full set of docs for the xls file format
When I bought the book I was quite irrate at the lack of useful content. It warms my heart all these years later to actually be able to put it to good use.
PS
They also included the full content of the book in various MSDN discs, and on their web site for several years. Then mysteriously pulled it a few years back.
Bets? (Score:5, Insightful)
It damn well will happen... It's just a matter of how long.
Re:Bets? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bets? (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
Sort of like HTML... if a browser encounters a flag it is not familiar with, it just ignores it.
Re:Bets? (Score:2)
Re:Bets? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bets? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bets? (Score:3, Interesting)
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:4, Informative)
Re:Bets? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bets? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bets? (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
I hope they do change the format (Score:3, Interesting)
I can dream, can't I?
Re:Bets? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
If not, then I'm not interested, thank you!
Re:Yes, but... (Score:2, Funny)
Good work for gnumeric! Nice, fast, clean and actually useful.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:2)
Yeah, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, but... Ask Ernie Ball if he cares! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:2)
Then it won't be.
What's your point?
But does it work the same? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
Re:But does it work the same? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:But does it work the same? (Score:2)
Re:But does it work the same? (Score:3, Interesting)
'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.
Re:But does it work the same? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:But does it work the same? (Score:2)
Give them a break, make your own choice. (Score:2)
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)
"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.
So now... (Score:2, Funny)
VBA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:VBA (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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)
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
Re:VBA (Score:2)
Now, the question is in what do I rewrite.
Re:VBA? hou bout PHP-GTK (Score:3, Interesting)
Hope it does a better job. (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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)
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? ;-)
Re:Hope it does a better job. (Score:3, Funny)
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!
Re:Hope it does a better job. (Score:2)
Did that happen in Superman 3 or something?
Re:Hope it does a better job. (Score:4, Informative)
oh the irony (Score:3, Funny)
Gnumeric is one of the outstanding OSS projects (Score:2)
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
Re:Gnumeric is one of the outstanding OSS projects (Score:2)
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)
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)
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)
Re:Bugs? (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Function Benchmarks? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Function Benchmarks? (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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.
Re:Ironic.... (Score:2)
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)?
Re:Ironic.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ironic.... (Score:2)
Copying Excel somewhat foolhardy (Score:3, Informative)
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].
Re:Copying Excel somewhat foolhardy (Score:3, Informative)
We're sharing quite a bit of code with R, and various solver libraries.
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:3, Insightful)
--LordKaT
gnumeric doesn't just copy excel (Score:4, Interesting)
Gnumeric is compatible. It is faster. It does more. That seems better to me, even when ignoring the price tag and lack of Evil(tm) technology.
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:3, Insightful)
Because few users will switchfrom Excel to Gnumeric if their old files don't work on the new software.
It's like asking why Abiword or Openoffice is spending resources to be able to open .doc files.
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and by the way, there's only so many ways to make a usable spreadsheet program. If a standard spreadsheet application exists, and a way of doing things already exists, why reinvent the wheel? This is just so people can be free from the Microsoft grind of upgrading every couple of years to a new, more bloated version of office.
There's still a long way to go though, just because we
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:2)
One was Lotus Improv. Radically different than most spreadsheets and far more usable.
The other was called "Advance". I don't remember who put it out, but I think it was inspired by Improv but then went several steps further to produce a tool that was more than just a spreadsheet (thoush you could do most spreadsheet things easily enough) - you could really build complex data
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:3, Informative)
It lacks Visual Basic support. And OLE support.
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:2)
Hell, excel script itself is unpopular because Microsoft includes a warning when you open the file about the script.
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:2)
What about imprecision, then?: good wholesome MS datacorruption...
Other posters ( flat pale people who hang 'round here, i believe ) state that real MS-Excel has significant errors in some operations ( in some uses ). Does gnumeric duplicate that?!?
Wine emulates SM-Windoze bugs, for compatibility, shouldn't we have a globally-broken work-means ( all software ) in order to comply with the Global Standard declared & ordered upon us, by the beeg boiz?
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:5, Insightful)
The situation is this: Take some very intelligent people, and provide them with a braindead tool that can, in the end, get the job done. Very few of them will have enough time to find something better, or even to know that there is something better. They will use the tool, and inadvertantly create a nightmare for whoever has to clean up after them.
A multidimensional array of variant, often executable data, with links to a broken-by-design half-object-oriented crudfest of a language, and a horrific hack of the C++ type system, is clearly not the route to computing nirvana.
The world would be a nicer place if these people knew about Python, Haskell, and Prolog, for example, which would accomplish their goals in a cleaner, more efficient and maintainable but ultimately less approachable way.
How do we get this to happen? Education. Only when computing (not "How to use some applications"), and multiple models of computing (procedural/OO, functional, and logical), are taught in schools at a young age ( 11 upwards), as a basic subject as fundamental as other sciences and humanities, will people do things "right" from the beginning.
Will it happen? Doubtful. All we can hope for is that someone comes up with something that strikes a balance, and lets people do their work easily, without creating a horrific mess. Also doubtful.
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:3, Insightful)
Does that mean the education system should not try to teach them these things?
Democracy is a horrific way to run an education system.
"I think we should learn how to tax dodge in school!"
"I want my sons to know how to get away with a bit of date rape!"
Computing is a pervasiv
Re:If in doubt, copy! (Score:4, Insightful)
Once you define yourself as a competitor, then you can start adding the cool stuff that differentiates your product.
MS knows this as well. Excel just didn't materialize from thin air. Spreadsheets started with Visicalc on the Apple ][. It was a truly innovative program that, to the people who understood it, justified the purchase of the machine. In much the same way that the graphics capabilities justified the purchase of a Macintosh, even if it had barely enough memory. The one truly imaginative thing MS has ever done is was combine the spreadsheet concept with the Macintosh concept. The original Excel was a truly beautiful and a deserving successor to Visicalc. But Excel was only a successor, not an original. And since them MS has lost the beauty in a bunch of extraneous crap.
I cannot say the same thing about word, as MacWrite was a superior product for many years.
Re:well (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, the reason we switched to doing this was due to the old system; where Access was running on PCs, and generating reports was so damned slow! It may seem unbelievable, but changing from Access+MySQL (we replicate from our Oracle server for reports and other stuff) to Perl+MySQL on Linux resulted in a staggering increase in speed. Reports that were taking an hour are now completed in under 2 minutes! The method I use to convert from Access->perl is, firstly take the Pseudo-SQL Access generates, then customise it a bit for MySQL, then use the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel module for perl. It's great!
I've never used Access myself BTW, and don't really understand what the hell it's doing to use all the CPU cycles. We watched it's activity one day - it ran a query on the Linux box, which took 12 seconds (monitored it with "top"), it then pegged the Windows PC - a P4 2.4ghz - running Access at 100% load for a good 20 minutes generating a spreadsheet!! WTF?!
So, to anyone else suffering with slow Access reports, learn some perl
Re:well (Score:5, Informative)
That assumes you've got things the way you want them in your SQL SELECT clause. If you need to tap every Recordset field prior to writing to a cell, one hopes your data are few.
Keeping this remotely on topic, are the various GNUmeric programming interfaces comparable to that beloved language, VBA?
Replacing Access Reports???? (Score:2)
Re:Replacing Access Reports???? (Score:2)
Of course, it takes slightly longer to set up a new report this way (although a lot of the code is pretty reusable), but it pays off when you convert a report that's generated many times a day, or there are many reports to generate.
For more speed, I can often get away with CSV files for the output - reducing (
Re:well (Score:3, Funny)
Re:well (Score:2)
Re:US version? (Score:3, Informative)
for example, in the old days when the UK used pounds,shillings,pence they'd have needed some special functions in the spreadsheet to work with currency values.
And who knows what extra functions may be needed to support Hebrew, Tamil, Farsi
Re:US version? (Score:3, Interesting)
There appear to be a few functions specific to the asian version of XL, notably
'PHONETIC'
that we (and every other opensource spreadsheet) are missing. I've been in contact with some Japanese developers, and we'll hopefully get some support from the Japanese govenrment to get these added as well.
Re:erm (Score:3, Funny)
Anyways, I agree with you. I would love to see some common code for doing macros, etc that we could use in the OSS world. If MS wishes to copy it, cool.
Re:Good job. (Score:2)
Lee
Re:Fast molasses ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Array formulas virtually non-existant (Score:5, Informative)
We can accurately reproduce results from every function in the US version of MS Excel.
We'd don't do quite as well comparing evalation techniques, although we're well ahead of OOo in that regard. 1.0.x had support for
- iterative evaluation
- implicit intersection
- and implicit type conversion
In 1.1.x we've added
- dynamic dependencies (eg OFFSET, or INDEX)
- constructed ranges (A1:INDEX(...))
- and support for implicit iteration for function arguments
That last one is the sole remaining issue as far as I know. I need to finish off support for implicit iteration for operators. Hard to say if it will go in for 1.2.0, probably not (although I've got it partially done), so it will likely wait until 1.3
User Defined Functions (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Innovate or emulate ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
While we'd all like to 'innovate' (god I hate that word now that MS has abused it) and improve things no one is going to care unless the cost of transition is fairl y low. Before Gnumeric could implement some of its neat new features like dynamic dependencies we had to first implement enough of MS Excel's semantics that people could move their existing data over. That is the key to the real monopoly in Redmond. _They_ control your data. Their products have the content needed to do your work locked up in their semantics, and their binary formats. Before we can start creating a bold new world, we've got to free the hostage content.
It should also be noted that MS has lavished vast resources onto its flagship products. Ignoring all of their work 'because we know better' seems like a fools bet. Over the years I've cursed them frequently, but have also built up a grudging respect for the depth of Excel. It drives me nuts at times, but at least it is a consistent nuts, for some of the murkier corner cases.
Now that Gnumeric has paid the piper, and spent five years understanding what it means to be a spreadsheet we've got more leeway. Which is why we've been able to move so far past XL in terms of quantity and quality of analytics. Hopefully, that tend will continue.
Yep, there's no contradiciton there. (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice work demolishing that troll, keep on going! Yeah!
It is possible to emulate, so that the user of M$ junk is not lost in the interface or data export, yet innovate by providing more and better functions. The world of free software is vast a
Re:Innovate or emulate ??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope ... I don't care how many whizbang innovations something has, if it can't READ my existing data, and read/write formats my business contacts use, it's worthless. You have to be "interoperable" to make any headway, because people can't afford to lose data.
On the bright side, as soon as people reas
Re:My Experiance (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you forward a copy of the file with the miss imported fonts ?
Please file a bug about 'replace by'. This is still a beta there is time to polish things before 1.2.0
Yah, it would be nice to have image preview in there. Its a simple project hopefully someone will tackle it.
How is the zoom dialog worse ? bugzilla your complaints please. They'll be easier to track/debate there.