LibreOffice Calc Set To Get GPU Powered Boost From AMD 211
darthcamaro writes "We all know that the open source LibreOffice Calc has been slow — forever and a day. That's soon going to change thanks to a major investment made by AMD into the Document Foundation. AMD is helping LibreOffice developers to re-factor Calc to be more performance and to be able to leverage the full power of GPUs and APUs. From the article: '"The reality has been that Calc has not been the fastest spreadsheet in the world," Suse Engineer Michael Meeks admitted. "Quite a large chunk of this refactoring is long overdue, so it's great to have the resources to do the work so that Calc will be a compelling spreadsheet in its own right."'"
Math operations will be accelerated using OpenCL, unit tests are being added for the first time, and the supposedly awful object oriented code is being rewritten with a "modern performance oriented approach."
If you need it you are doing it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
Spreadsheets are all rectangular. That's pretty inflexible. Show me a triangular spreadsheet and then we'll talk.
Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
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An N-dimensional spreadsheet probably wouldn't be too hairy to describe as a mathematical structure; but the UI might get pretty dreadful.
Right (Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong.) (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the UI for Lotus Improv was quite nice and won some awards.
Its (spiritual) successor, Quantrix Financial Modeler seems to be selling well enough, even w/ a $1,495 price point.
I wish that Flexisheet (an opensource take on this sort of thing) would get more traction.
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Lotus had a cool object-based spreadsheet system on the Next computer, called Improv [wikipedia.org]. Improv attempted to redefine what spreadsheets were and how they worked, and once you got used to it, it was great. The basic principle was separation of data, views, and formulas (was this pre-figuring MVC?), and individual sheets could be any size - I'm not sure about 'triangular' per se though.
But alas, Improv never sold well on either NextStep (although it was very popular amongst financial modeling folks, and sold a
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Spreadsheets are all rectangular.
That's not necessarily correct. In its core, a spreadsheet is a DAG of computation-performing nodes. The presentation style is merely a historical happenstance.
Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thats not the issue. If your spreadsheet is SO larger that on a MODERN CPU, its slow ... you're doing it wrong.
You can make insanely complex, application like spreadsheets, without noticing 'recalc' time. By the time you get to noticing 'recalc' time, you've fucked up.
Caveat: OO.org is known to have some of the crappiest code in existence, so with the case of Calc, you don't have to make ridiculous spreadsheets to notice recalc time. GPU support won't fix the problem however as its not the math thats the issue, its the shitty logic code filled with stupid crap written by clueless devs that cause Calc to be so slow.
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GPU support won't fix the problem however as its not the math thats the issue, its the shitty logic code filled with stupid crap written by clueless devs that cause Calc to be so slow.
Indeed. You really shouldn't need to have to get a gaming GPU to run a spreadsheet. Hopefully
"and the supposedly awful object oriented code is being rewritten with a "modern performance oriented approach".
means they intend to address that part, too, and the crappy headline is just being whiz-bang. If they're dumb enough that they think throwing inappropriate hardware at the problem is a solution... well, they're too far from the vicinity of the US Pacific coast...
The GPU is likely idle so why not use it? (Score:2)
Indeed. You really shouldn't need to have to get a gaming GPU to run a spreadsheet. Hopefully
If you are doing trivial calculations then you are probably right. However many of us do more with spreadsheets than making grocery lists. There are quite a few [wikipedia.org] problems that benefit from parallel processing. Since the GPU is probably sitting mostly idle if you have a spreadsheet up, why not do something useful with it?
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If they're dumb enough that they think throwing inappropriate hardware at the problem is a solution
What inappropriate hardware? OpenCL, for example, is quite flexible at allowing you to distribute problems to appropriate computing nodes in a heterogeneous system.
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Probably they had some developer mobility betwen Star Division and SAP :/ /me ducks and runs
Appropriate tool use (Score:5, Interesting)
Thats not the issue. If your spreadsheet is SO larger that on a MODERN CPU, its slow ... you're doing it wrong.
It is a relatively trivial matter to make calculations on a dataset slow regardless of the tool used. I work with datasets and related calculations all the time that would make for slow calculations if you hand coded them in assembler. The mere fact that it is slow in a spreadsheet as well has nothing inherently to do with it being worked on in a spreadsheet. Now if the spreadsheet can't handle 65K rows by 65K columns then it shouldn't offer that size table as an option. But most can handle datasets that size and larger without too much trouble. For rapid data modeling and ad-hoc analysis a spreadsheet can be pretty hard to beat.
When people go wrong using spreadsheets it's usually one of a few ways. The one I see the most is when they take what should be a prototype analysis and turn it into a production tool. If you need to put a bunch of buttons and other interface tools on a spreadsheet THEN you are doing it wrong. The second is when they try to take analyzed data involving more than 3 dimensions. While it can be done it rarely is a good idea. Another I see is if they try to have more than one person working on the spreadsheet. If the dataset is truly huge or you require multi-user access or you need to interface with other applications then by all means use something other than a spreadsheet.
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Now if the spreadsheet can't handle 65K rows by 65K columns then it shouldn't offer that size table as an option.
It's not just a matter of mere number of cells. If the cell is "=A1*B2" and A1 and B2 are natural numbers, it probably doesn't pay off. But what if they are 2048x2048-sized matrices (for those spreadsheet applications that allow for that)? This way, you can either use more active cells, OR you can use more complicated calculations in the individual cells.
Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
Spreadsheets are good for "throwaway applications" you need to do these calculations fast or gather data, and after a few weeks you don't need it anymore.
If you are going to be following a process with a fairly rigid data sets. You are going to be better off spending the time and money to make a real application with a real database with it. That way the rigidness is to your favor to prevent incompatible creep, and allow for future data gathering abilities.
Using Spreadsheets for your application needs works but it is very flimsy and over the long run you will be spending a lot more time fixing your mistakes (say a bad sort) Or a mistime change and save, or just the wrong click of your mouse you messed up a lot of data.
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The reality (sad ?) is that a huge percentage of financial modeling by the investment banks is done on Excel. Every trader has their own custom versions. Some flash crash-type events have been traced back to bugs in the spreadsheets. Excel makes it very easy to build a useful financial model very quickly, without a lot of 'programming' - although it is still programming, just don't tell those guys. (It's been pointed out elsewhere here that Lotus Improv and its descendants were/are better, and the desce
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For many of the situations that the parent is talking about, this is not true. Spreadsheets with massive business logic are extremely expensive and very inflexible, more so than DB apps. Just no central group/organization reviews, audits, and tallies these costs like they do for developed applications. Therefore, people assume the spreadsheet is cheaper. Do actual IT audits where these things fall into scope... and you quickly realize just how ridiculously risky the entire deck-of-cards-business is runn
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I'm not a stock trader, but if I were, I'd much rather bang out a spreadsheet in 20 minutes (or modify one I'm already using) than wait several days at best for 'some dork in IT' to get a round tuit. Assuming it's possible to explain what I want to the IT guy*. In fact, IT will probably _never_ get a round tuit - they've got bigger fish to fry, and they're six months or two years behind schedule already. And the problem I'm working on will be over and done in 20 minutes - I need the model NOW, before Lon
Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree. Also, if you rewrite structured code into a "performance oriented approach", you are doing it wrong.
Write code so it is easy to understand. Then compilers should understand how to make it fast.
This can only come from people who think code is for machines. Code is for humans to read and modify.
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Then compilers should understand how to make it fast.
Should but often don't.
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Write code so it is easy to understand. Then compilers should understand how to make it fast.
Could a compiler have come up with the fast inverse square root [wikipedia.org]?
I once got a 10% speed increase just by moving a pointer offset increment. The compiler missed that one.
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Could a compiler have come up with the fast inverse square root?
The answer is "probably yes". Granted, you'd have to design a compiler of your own - a very specialized one, one that would take numerical approximations and algebraic identities into consideration - but it's definitely not impossible, it's just that nobody probably felt it necessary to do so. There are also techniques out there for exploratory automatic programming (for example, genetic programming and superoptimization) that might help you with the problem.
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I agree. Also, if you rewrite structured code into a "performance oriented approach", you are doing it wrong. Write code so it is easy to understand. Then compilers should understand how to make it fast.
I.e., code should be written in high-level descriptive languages, and the compiler should choose the algorithm, so that a tricky-to-understand but much-faster algorithm doesn't show up in the code as written, but shows up in the generated code?
Not all rewrites-for-performance involve low-level trickiness.
Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
I agree. Also, if you rewrite structured code into a "performance oriented approach", you are doing it wrong.
Nonsense. One of the joys of C++, is the lack of reflection. This tends to lead apps down the route of wrapping everything into an 'Attribute' class of some description, and wiring those attributes together using a dependency graph. The problem with this (very clean OOP) approach, is that it simply doesn't scale. Before too long, this constant plucking of individual data values from your graph, ends up becomming a really grim bottleneck. If you then run the code through a profiler, rather than seeing any noticeable spikes, you end up looking at an app that's warm all over. If you're in this situation, no amount of refactoring is going to save the product. You're only option is to restructure the
The "performance oriented approach" is the only approach you can take these days. Instead of having a fine OOP granularity on all of your data, you batch data into arrays, and then dispatch the computation on the SIMD units of the CPU, or on the GPU.
Then compilers should understand how to make it fast.
Uhm, nope. Sure, if you happen to have 4 additions right next to each other, the compiler might replace that with an ADDPS. In the case in point however, you'll probably expect a generic node to perform the addition on single items in the table. As such, your "addTwoTableElementsTogether" node isn't going to have 4 floating point ops next to each other, it will only have one. Compilers cannot optimise your data structures. If you want to stand a chance of having the compiler do most of the gruntwork for you, you actually have to spend time re-factoring your data structures to better align them with the SIMD/AVX data types. Some people call this a "performance oriented approach".
This can only come from people who think code is for machines. Code is for humans to read and modify.
Bullshit. This can only come from experienced software developers who understand that the only approach to improving performance of a large scale app, is to restructure the data layout to better align it with modern CPUs. There is *NOTHING* about this approach that makes the code harder to read or follow - that's just your lack of software engineering experience clouding your judgement.
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Indeed. In my experience the only language that (historically) used more memory and cycles to get things done than OO was LISP - and I think that was largely corrected in later implementations of LISP. I have a project just now that uses a canned, very OO library to process (oddly enough) Excel spreadsheets. One particular sheet, with about 3000 mostly empty rows of data (no formulas), results in running out of memory after 20 minutes and 8 GB. The cause? I think each cell results in multiple separate
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It really bugs me when people conflate OO with anti-pattern x. In what world does OO mean the same as "use lots of threads"?
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Except code can end up going through so many layers of abstraction, with some of those layers doing things in the most inefficient manner possible because terrible assumptions were made.
Sometimes, you need to plan for both performance and well structured code -- or you can end up writing garbage which makes h
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Done the same during the algorithm course. On a turing machine you don't have such shiny operators like addition even less multiplication :)
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You could have gone further - every arithmetic and logical operation can be performed by (IIRC) a series of XORs and NOTs. I look forward to your implementation, preferably using fluidics! :D
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I'd like to see you implement an AND gate with just XORs and NOTs. Use as many as you like... ;-)
In all seriousness, you can build all other gates from NANDs. Or from NORs. In fact, that's how the Cray 1 was built, apparently. Tons and tons of ECL NAND gates.
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If so, it probably needs a custom allocator, that's all.
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Object-oriented code, not structured code.
These two are not complementary. Or did you throw away block-structured conditionals and loops in your OO code and reverted to using conditional and unconditional jumps?
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I'd trust the compiler to do it a whole lot more than I'd trust the programmer. Things like cache locality are going to be very dependent on machine architecture. You should not be optimizing for machine architectur
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HLLs makes code easier to read. HLLs also makes it easy to generate non-optimal code.
Except for many application areas where (V)HLLs can actually be more efficient than other languages. For example, some languages (such as Haskell) give you the nice property that nested maps can be fused.
Example: which way do you iterate through an array to apply an operation to each element? Well, _if_ you happen to have iterated through it recently, doing it backwards might be lot faster then doing it forwards due to cache locality.
This is 1) nonsense and 2) exactly the kind of code where a HLL will help you much more. (Why would you iterate twice through it and not use the loops in the way I've just described?)
Compilers are lovely, but they can only take advantage of fairly simple things.
Yeah, *simple* compilers, perhaps.
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i thought excel for super computers was a joke...
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If you need it you are doing it wrong
That's begging the question, sort of. Who said anything about needing it?
If your spreadsheet needs a gpu to speed up calculations, you are possibly misusing spreadsheets.
FTFY. If a spreadsheet is capable of doing what someone wants, who are you to say it shouldn't be done that way?
But if you have a spreadsheet that needs this much of cpu time to recompute
Again with the "need." This isn't being done for the people who need fast spreadsheets. It's being done so all spreadsheets can go faster. Who wouldn't appreciate a spreadsheet recalculating in 0.1s instead of 0.5s?
you should probably be using a full fledged data base with multiple precomputed indexing.
Well, now you can draw your arbitrary "this is too slow for spreadsheets" line further away from Calc. That's al
Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, you can put together a spreadsheet in a few hours.
What you're describing is likely months of custom development and design, and a whole new thing to maintain.
Spreadsheets are popular because they're easily deployed, don't require any extra licensing, and the people who know how to use them can likely do things with them that some of us would be astounded at.
I know people who use spreadsheets for pretty much everything, because it's available to them readily, and they've been using them for a long time.
It's all well and good to suggest that they use a full-fledged database -- but in reality, they can probably get something useful in a few days for a fraction of the cost.
It sounds like in this instance, the code was just horribly inefficient.
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Months to put together a bit of SQL and some front end for it, using, say, oh horror of horrors, Excel? Next you're going to tell me that it takes a man-month to write a hello world.
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Not at all, but I will flat out tell you that I've seen domain specific spreadsheets which have surprisingly little to do with adding numbers, and which if you tried to replace it with a DB application would take you months (or years) to do -- and you'd end up with something you still have to maintain.
Spreadsheets have the really nice feature of still mostly working when you upgrade the version of the software.
I'm not saying they'
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I know and it's lamentable. I still don't see what kind of an easy-to-do-in-a-spreadsheet kind of a business "application" would take months or years to do data storage/management in SQL...
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Who said "easy to do"? I've seen stuff done in spreadsheets which evolved over years, and I know people who do stuff in Excel that leaves my head spinning.
You'd be amazed at the wacky stuff people can do in Excel. Many of the things I've seen done with it over the years probably evolved over a long time, but the end result is something which isn'
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I still don't see what kind of an easy-to-do-in-a-spreadsheet kind of a business "application" would take months or years to do data storage/management in SQL...
The kind a mid-level employee evolves on a daily basis. Duh.
The task at hand isnt concrete, the task at hand is answering "What if I..."
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Absolutely. But how often are companies willing to pay for them? In my experience, probably far less than you might feel they should.
You say 'musing the tools', they say 'getting their job done with the tools provided to them'.
There's all kinds of things which could or should be written as a specific application -- but getting most companies to invest in them is an uphill battle.
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You are correct for business applications. But often what spreadsheets are used for is: "I need this quarterly report figured out for the meeting on Friday and then I'm going to delete it forever." Going out an building a full fledged database for that would be stupid. Having a very complicated spreadsheet that solves a problem isn't bad... using that spreadsheet over and over as part of your business process is.
Live a day in my shoes (Score:5, Informative)
If your spreadsheet needs a gpu to speed up calculations, you are probably misusing spreadsheets.
Or it just means that you have some pretty complicated calculations. More computing horsepower never hurts.
I know most accountants love the spreadsheet and they make insanely complicated things using spreadsheets pushing it far beyond what these are designed to do.
I happen to be an accountant as well as an engineer. What pray tell do you think spreadsheets were designed to do? (hint - it involves rapid data modeling) They aren't much use if the only problems you solve are toy problems. Plus they require relatively little training to use effectively. Someone can be trained to solve real world problems MUCH easier than with most other tools. Most of the problems I'm asked to solve are ad-hoc investigations into specific questions. I shouldn't need a four year degree on Comp-Sci to accomplish a bit of data modeling.
But if you have a spreadsheet that needs this much of cpu time to recompute, you should probably be using a full fledged data base with multiple precomputed indexing.
I use some rather complicated spreadsheets. A database would be of no advantage whatsoever for 99.9% of what I use a spreadsheet for. Furthermore a database would be a lot slower to develop, harder to update, and require significant user interface development. If I'm crunching sales data or generating financial projections a spreadsheet is almost always the easiest and most useful tool for the job.
Databases come into the picture when: A) other applications need to interface with the data, B) the dataset becomes truly enormous, or C) the number of dimensions in the data exceeds 2 to 3. Sometimes I use databases. Most of the time they would be a waste of money, brains and time. Frequently when I actually need a database I'll create a mock up of the tables and calculations on a spreadsheet first which lets me work out the structure much more easily.
While it is certainly possible to use a spreadsheet inappropriately, a spreadsheet should be able to handle a rather large amount of data and calculations before it chokes.
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You should know basic programming upon exiting high school. Yeah, the sad state of K-12 curricula are something to lament another time.
So, what tool do you use to diff your spreadsheets? How do you ensure that there isn't a bug in a column of otherwise "identical" formulas? How do you ensure that whatever column you've filled with imported data still has this imported data in it? Where's your log that shows that you haven't unlocked some cells by mistake and messed them up "subtly"?
Spreadsheets provide a se
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You should know basic programming upon exiting high school.,
Programming has been a significant part of my job in years past. You have no idea what my background is.
So, what tool do you use to diff your spreadsheets? How do you ensure that there isn't a bug in a column of otherwise "identical" formulas?... blah blah
There are a multitude of ways to error check spreadsheets. RTFM. There also are plenty of tools to replicate formulas (or formatting or numbers). Furthermore you are inappropriately applying data modeling techniques that typically do not apply to what people need out of a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets aren't the right tool for every job but they are a great tool for many.
Spreadsheets provide a semblance of productivity and an illusion of efficiency.
Spoken well and truly like someon
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Re:If you need it you are doing it wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
This. A thousand times this.
Somewhere along the way, our industry has developed a collective mentality "we're smarter than you, and we will give you what we want even if we have no idea of what you need".
Once you get a little further removed and realize that the stuff we're writing/supporting is intended to help the people who do the real, bread and butter parts of the business -- you start to realize if we're an impediment to them, it's worse than if we weren't there at all.
They're not interested in some smug little bastard looking down his nose at them because they couldn't possibly do what he does. They're interested in getting their stuff done as quickly as possible.
I can tell you there is nothing more frustrating and counterproductive than some kid straight out of school who thinks the world needs to bow at his feet and stand aside to allow him to tell them how they should do things. Sadly, I've also met developers who have been in the industry a long time who still act like that.
In many industries, the people who do the real work of the company have highly specialized knowledge, and software is just a tool. And that tool is either helping them get stuff done, or frustrating the hell out of them.
Acting like we know better than they do (when we in fact know nothing at all about their domain expertise) is at best condescending, and at worst an impediment and a liability.
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yes but we are talking about having to gpu accelerate a f'ing spreadsheet here, one a sheet gets to this point you are far and beyond the point where it is reasonable to switch to a more powerful tool. spreadsheets like this are huge amounts of spaghetti code mixed with badly written vb8 macros this is a nightmare for everyone involved. while this does not call for a full fledged compiled app, usually, switching over to using something like MS access or libra/open office base even if it means a few afternoo
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If your spreadsheet needs a gpu to speed up calculations, you are probably misusing spreadsheets. I know most accountants love the spreadsheet and they make insanely complicated things using spreadsheets pushing it far beyond what these are designed to do. But if you have a spreadsheet that needs this much of cpu time to recompute, you should probably be using a full fledged data base with multiple precomputed indexing.
The problem is that unlike MS Office, the ODF format does not typically store pre-calculated values of formals; so when you load a file it has to run all the formulas, etc to generate what the user wants to see. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just a little slower. An easy optimization would be for ODF to store formula results as part of the cell contents - but that's a change to the ODF standard AND the software that uses it.
Now, as per auto-calculating the spreadsheet and storing the values - tha
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But if you have a spreadsheet that needs this much of cpu time to recompute, you should probably be using a full fledged data base with multiple precomputed indexing.
I agree, by that point, you should have definitely moved to MS Access.
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Gnumeric is great, tends to focus on accuracy too whereas msexcel truncates numbers over a certain size (among other weirdness) and libreoffice seems to copy it...
However...
If they weren't designed to do things then they wouldn't be able to do them, would they?
I could use a 40 ton truck to deliver a single letter, i could drive myself to work in that same truck, and if all i had was a 40 ton truck and i only wanted to do the journey once or twice i might even do so, despite how awkward it would be driving such a large vehicle not to mention the fuel usage.
On the other hand, the more often i di
Re:Libre Office Calc isn't that good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at it this way ... the 40-ton truck in your metaphor (Excel or something like it) is provided to everyone in the company from day 1. From the receptionist to the CEO, everyone gets a 40-ton truck. You know that everyone can carry the same stuff in their 40-ton trucks because they are all pretty much the same.
Furthermore, before you even leave highschool, people tech you how to use that 40-ton truck.
Now, imagine that you need to solve a new problem, which is shockingly similar to problems you've already solved.
So you could go through 6 months to a year of fighting to get someone to help you build a station wagon with a baby seat and tinted windows, because the 40-ton truck is overkill. And you need to convince someone help pay for the station wagon since they didn't budget for one of those.
After you've gone through all of that process, the station wagon has never materialized, the cost overruns make it look like you're buying a gold-plated Rolls Royce, but the engine is still a cardboard mock-up, and the people building it for you have forgotten to include headlamps, windshield wipers, turn signals, seatbelts, and a speedometer. But if you will submit a change order to have them build those, you can wait another period of time (and even more money).
Or, you take the 40-ton truck to do what you need, take a little extra time to find a parking spot, and in the end you've got something which covered your needs in a shorter period of time and for no extra costs except your time. You can get to the grocery store and back in a few hours, and you're done.
That is why people use spreadsheets and don't always jump straight for the custom application.
Clarification (Score:5, Informative)
Calc is based on object oriented design from 20 years ago when developers thought that a cell should be an object and that creates a huge number of problems around doing things efficiently.
The problem isn't that Calc is object-oriented but was designed such that many things depended on the spreadsheet cell.
Re:Clarification (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, and it sounds like the GPU angle is really just a hook to get AMD funding. The more important improvements will be refactoring the representation so it doesn't suck in the first place.
Re:Clarification (Score:4, Interesting)
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Refactor? APU? (Score:4, Interesting)
If the refactor is done properly I don't think the OpenCL acceleration would be necessary. Heck, 1-2-3 running on a 486 was pretty speedy.
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I ran Lotus Symphony on a 286. It was the job that convinced me to go back to school for a career in IT.
Also, get off my lawn.
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A 286? Luxury!
I used to use AppleWorks on an Apple II GS running a 65C816 chip, and that's the system that convinced me that programming was a fun hobby.
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If the refactor is done properly I don't think the OpenCL acceleration would be necessary.
They are going to need it for the flight simulator function. [eeggs.com]
Spreadsheet applications shouldn't need GPU!! (Score:2)
Am I the only one that notices how crazy that sounds?
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OpenCL doesn't mean it will need a GPU but that it can use one if available. OpenCL can use your CPU and there will be performance advantage on those cases too, they can use tuned OpenCL libraries instead of rewriting everything inside LibreOffice
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No-one's saying spreadsheets need GPU acceleration. But why shouldn't the GPU be taken advantage of?
Parallel computing (Score:2)
Am I the only one that notices how crazy that sounds?
Why should it sound crazy? If you've got some parallel computations to make you'd be a fool not to use the GPU. There are many problems [wikipedia.org] that could take advantage of the extra computing horsepower that are perfectly appropriate to do on a spreadsheet.
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Why should it sound crazy? If you've got some parallel computations to make you'd be a fool not to use the GPU.
1. For simple tasks, parallel computing often ends up slower becuase the time taken to transfer data between processors is more than the time taken to do the calculations.
2. If you need teraflops of performance to process your spreadsheet, you're probably like my friend who used to write novels in Excel.
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Sure, rewriting the code to be more efficient and then throwing in OpenCL acceleration IS a bit of a redneck approach to things, but at the end of the day, why wouldn't you want the metaphorical V10 crammed in to your spreadsheet software? If it can be done gracefully, why not?
Worth mentioning that Good Guy AMD isn't making it proprietary.
well, given their track record with performance it would be better if they first sorted out the performance bottlenecks elsewhere and then brought in opencl for doing raytrace calculations from the spreadsheet.
Why not Javelin? (Score:3)
Spreadsheets lead the inexperienced, down the garden path of "Oh, this looks easy..."
At some point you think, Oh, let me just sort this column. And you fail to realize some formula on sheet 27 presumes a linkage between column C on sheet 5 and column F on sheet 13. So now your entire model is garbage.
In all these decades, hasn't anyone resuscitated Javelin [wikipedia.org] with its time-oriented models, where what looked like a spreadsheet was just a view of the underlying model? "Javelin understands the arrow of time" -- 1985 slogan
and still no "normal view" (Score:2)
Why oh why can't the bleeptards at LibreOffice recognize that proper document editing is done in a "Galley View" which MsoftWord refers to as "Draft" (previously "Normal" ) view? Displaying page boundaries, headers & footers, etc is of exactly zero benefit while one is composing the text of the document.
Personally, I'd like not to see text formatting either (bold, font size, etc) but I can live with that. At least until I find a company that supports LaTex, anyway. For that matter, why couldn't Li
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Why oh why can't the bleeptards at LibreOffice recognize that proper document editing is done in a "Galley View" which MsoftWord refers to as "Draft" (previously "Normal" ) view? Displaying page boundaries, headers & footers, etc is of exactly zero benefit while one is composing the text of the document. Personally, I'd like not to see text formatting either (bold, font size, etc) but I can live with that. At least until I find a company that supports LaTex, anyway. For that matter, why couldn't LibreOffice (and Micrsoft too) have a twin-pane editor like TexMaker? Do your typing in one pane and observe the fully rendered page in the other as desired?
grrrrrrumble
C'est a little off topic, but I so very much agree. Top reason I can't cut the M$Word cord for Writer. Please, LibreOffice people, please?
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My version of LibreOffice has this (4.0.3.3).
Menu --> View --> Print Layout toggles the behaviour.
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LibreOffice refers to this as "web layout", and its right there in the view menu.
As for why it doesn't work like LaTeX, i guess thats because its aiming at a totally different market... Most people simply don't understand the idea of formatting being separated from content, they just want to lay the page out as they see it - as if they were doing it by hand. Also modern word processors have moved more towards traditional DTP applications, where there is a focus on layout rather than on typesetting a large b
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Yeah, that bug was opened by yours truly.
And I do agree that headers are of negative (not zero) benefit
I like it (Score:2)
Re:How is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think most people say Calc is just as good as Excel - they say that it is good enough for most people. And that is probably true. I think my boss uses excel for simple formulas and for lists. I use Excel for anything not quite worthy of a Matlab script, so OpenOffice doesn't quite measure up for me but should work fine for my boss.
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I think my boss uses excel for simple formulas and for lists. I use Excel for anything not quite worthy of a Matlab script, so OpenOffice doesn't quite measure up for me but should work fine for my boss.
Your boss isn't interested in what you think.
What he needs is an office suite -- or integrated office system -- that can be deployed across the enterprise.
It doesn't matter if any single component is overkill for some so long as it works for all. Including temps, trainees, volunteers and so on.
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My boss isn't stupid. She buys me a MATLAB and JMP license, and the design guys get CAD licenses. We are swimming in specialized software that she does not buy for herself. She only uses Excel because someone up the chain went with a site license for MS Office. If they hadn't made that decision, she'd use whatever made the next-best list maker (I believe she used Quatro Pro prior to our site license). We also use the abysmal Sharepoint system as a glorified shared drive, just because it is there.
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I love array functions. I mean, I hate them, but not as much as I hate writing VBA! I feel like MS could really make Excel more powerful if they improved the editing/editing/debugging of array functions. Maybe more people would use them if they were easier to construct.
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I use Calc all the time at home, and Excel all the time at work. Calc is great, but it's not as polished or feature-rich as Excel by a long shot.
Calc is good enough (more than good enough, in fact) for home use; it does everything I need it to, as quickly as I need it to, with features to spare. But Excel is still the better programme. If I had to do serious data crunching in Calc day in and day out, I'm sure it would drive me nuts.
Arguably, Excel is the only truly good programme in the MS Office suite (pos
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And despite all this, and the fact they target far fewer platforms, MS still puts out an extremely buggy application, with poor forwards/backwards compatibility, virtually no intentional interoperability with anything else, and major inconsistencies between the 2 platforms that they do support.
The only difference with MS bugs is that users have come to expect them and know the workarounds. Ask anyone who uses ms applications heavily and they will have all kinds of kludgy hacks memorised to get around functi
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How does office have poor forwards and backwards compatibility? Troll much?
well in the usual way that you need to keep overlapping versions around.
though, the anon gp is putting a wee bit too much on how much ms puts effort into their things... ms doesn't run tests on 256mbyte ram hw just for seeing that there's not enough memory. I seriously doubt ms even tests different video drivers since they have little to do with office itself(and if the driver passed certification it should run it). on arm side ms just dictated what hw it can run on so not that much testing to be done there
Re:the problem with OpenOffice (Score:5, Informative)
It's well documented, you can find examples all over google, eg:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20111230095628470 [macworld.com]
Infact there are many people who use libreoffice to open and convert corrupted (or very old) files which are making msoffice crash, libreoffice is far more tolerant of unexpected data in the input files as unexpected data is a given when attempting to reverse engineer undocumented formats.
And to give one personal example, msoffice 97 onwards had a bug in the macro function whereby the line counting function ignored lines with bullet points, so we had an extremely kludgy macro which counted the lines and then iterated through looking for bullet points and increased the line count accordingly... MS decided to fix this particular bug in a "security update" for office 2003, but then reintroduce the bug in 2007... Obviously this kludgy macro catastrophically broke the day that patch got rolled out.
I could understand if it broke going from 2003 to 2007, but not for what is supposed for be a security update to change something like that.
Also even moving files between the exact same patch release of msoffice on different machines can cause problems with formatting, as it reformats depending on available fonts and printer settings.
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Publisher. For YEARS. Maybe the very new versions are different, but I have this every day with people bringing in old/new versions of Publisher files.
And no import filter is ever perfect, even if it was written by MS, for opening MS formats, for a MS application.
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There has to be a substantial, paid, fulltime project team to do UI, feature work, localization, QA and regression testing, doc, and document interoperability/backwards compatibility for each release. Testing has to cover many OS releases, video drivers, and targeted display devices as well as end user natural language, and include reduced RAM/swap space installations. That's what Microsoft has. That's why I don't consider OpenOffice a bargain even for free.
Wise words, my brother. That's exactly the problem with many OSS projects. Modern software is so complex that you really want solid funding and good bunch of full-time developers and quality assurance people to make a perfect product. If this was the case with OpenOffice too, it would have already steamrolled MS Office.
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Good to see the "editors" are as incompetence as always.
There, FTFY
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It's only recent that Visio format is supported at all. Give them some time. It's a lot of work. Note that LibreOffice is, at the moment, IIRC the only piece of software that can open the early Visio 1 and 2 format files. Not even Microsoft Visio can open them (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, of course).
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