Gnumeric is intended to be a drop in replacement for proprietary spreadsheets. It imports your existing Excel, 1-2-3, Applix, Sylk, XBase Quattro Pro, Dif, Plan Perfect, and Oleo files among others. The latest version 1.4.0 brings some major new features including:A port to GTK+ 2.4, and bugfixes. Charting engine improvements in progress include single point formatting, bubble plots, error bars, and radar plots. Work on rich text editing for cells has started. The new file selector is now used. The Win32 port is now almost complete. The gconf dependency is being compartmentalized and should be ready to drop out for the next release. Charting engine improvements. Image export for xls has been implemented. Improved compatibility with MS formulas. A Paradox db importer has been added and the Psion importer revived. Switched to a SAX-based exporter for .gnumeric files. Old code was cleaned out, printing improvements were made, grid lines were added for charts, and the documentation was improved.
Additionally, AbiWord 2.2.0 was released (not officially announced yet either). The impatient can get the files here, which includes a Mac OS X version.
I guess I will finally dump OOo and go back to GnomeOffice (Gnumeric and Abiword) on my Ubuntu system. I know Gnumeric and Abiword are not everything that OOo is, but they are oh so much faster, and more visually appealing as well.
I think it’s about the only spreadsheet that can’t.
One of the things that I find really irritating about Gnumeric (I am using 1.2) is the limitations of what you can do with its graphing engine. For example you cannot draw a linear regression plot showing the experimental points and the best fit regression line together.
I could do this on Lotus 123 and Borland Quattro in DOS 15 years ago but can’t do it on Gnumeric now. Does anyone know if the situation has been improved yet?
what is the powerpoint equivalent iam sick of using ooffice.org
it does both. Try Save as XHTML and then just open it again in Gnumeric
AbiWord is OK with short documents but it is a hopeless memory hog when trying to edit really large documents. I downloaded this file http://simplylinux.punted.net/SimplyLinuxBook.zip , unzipped it to text document and opened it first with AbiWord 2.2.0 and then with OpenOffice Writer (version 1.1.3). AbiWord took several minutes to open this text and it ate about 90 Megs of RAM. OO Writer opened the same document in a second and it consumed only a fraction of the RAM that AbiWord needed.
When, if ever, are Abiword and Gnumeric going to use the OASIS files as default standard? Anyone have inside information here?
AbiWord is not really a Gnome program; it does not require Gnome to be installed, just GTK and some other libraries. Does anyone know about such a spreadsheet program as well? I’m looking for it because I don’t want to install Gnome nor KDE just to have a spreadsheet, an OO is too big as well…
GH
The presentation program is called criawips. This program is still in early phases of development, so you’ll have to wait quite a bit…
Actually Abiword CAN depend on gnome for improvement in the areas it needs. For example, it can use it’s own printing engine or the gnome one. It just dosn’t require gnome.
Is this Linux only?
Does anyone know if there is a native port in progress? Thanks
it is available also for Windows and for MacOs X. Look for “abiword-setup-2.2.0.exe” and “AbiWord-2.2.0.dmg” at the given link, respectively. I just tried the MacOs version and although being not as polished as typical MacOs applications (see lack of extensive keyboard shortcuts) it is extremely lightweight. I mean compared to Word 2004 it is lightspeed!
cheers
Does Gnumerik support PivotTables?
Well, there is Siag-Office, which is pretty small, even with requisite libraries. Unfortunately, it’s also quite ugly and barren of advanced features. I used the spreadsheet component for a short time on my 75 MHz machine and found it passable.
“what is the powerpoint equivalent iam sick of using ooffice.org”
Criawips (http://www.nongnu.org/criawips/) is about what you will want once it matures.
as my old boss told me, the problem domain can be partitioned into two spaces. if the problem is simple, use a calculator. if it isn’t, program/scirpt a solution. never use a spreadsheet.
i can’t believe OSS developers are wasting time and energy trying to shoehorn (http://skepdic.com/shoehorning.html) complex functions and algorthms into a spreadsheet. clustering, anova, least squares regression … and more .. these are not suited to the spreadsheet paradigm. accountants and illiterate business-types want to do everything in spreadsheets. i’ve seen people use spreadsheets for DTP!
no crap. I once got a *price list* mailed to me in .xls format. yeesh…
it wasn’t a complicated price list with a well-designed spreadsheet to let them update prices or whatever. no, it was just a simple list, manually typed into random cells in excel. I think they just used it because they didn’t know how to line stuff up in Word, frankly.
Does anyone know about such a spreadsheet program as well? I’m looking for it because I don’t want to install Gnome nor KDE just to have a spreadsheet
There’s PlanMaker[1], it’s a commercial Qt-application ($50). I got my copy for 22 Euro only during a marketing campaign
I haven’t yet used it extensively so I cannot say much about advanced features. On my laptop, it boots in ~3 seconds. Anyways, there’s a demo[2] available.
Apropos Gnumeric: The last Gnumeric version I have tried (1.2x) surprised me with speed and some nice features but it crashed repeatedly when importing CSV files that OOo opened without problems. Besides, it lacked conditional formatting, a feature I use regularly for simple overviews.
[1] http://www.softmaker.de/pml_en.htm
[2] http://www.softmaker.de/pmldemo_en.htm
“as my old boss told me, the problem domain can be partitioned into two spaces. if the problem is simple, use a calculator. if it isn’t, program/scirpt a solution. never use a spreadsheet.”
Hehe. Where was your boss when Visicalc was being written?
It’s simply Amazing
OpenOffice is currently quite clunky on OS X, but AbiWord uses native UI controls and follows OS X guidelines (at least somewhow) and feels more like OS X app. It’s very worth trying for free replacement for Microsoft Word X on Mac! 
While specialized mathematics programs provide better ways to work with complex statistics, spreadsheets are excellent for what they were originally intended for…performing lots of mundane calculations very quickly and presenting them in an easily accessible manner. At my company we’ve been using spreadsheets for over 60 years for financial analysis. We basically examine historical financial statements of many companies and compute tons of ratios that we then examine for what we do. When spreadsheets were finally computerized in the early 80s, there was a boom in productivity.
I’m rapidly moving away from OOo “calc” to Gnumeric. Actually I only have 1 spreadsheet left that I still use under OOo. It’s just too big to convert. But it’s a yearly sheet so I’m hopeful that starting January 1, 2005 I’ll move it over to Gnumeric also. My only concern in doing that is that currently, OOo is more portable. At least to Windows. There’s no Gnumeric for Windows that I’m aware of.
Also – I love Abiword. It’s really fast and looks great. But I have a question/comment about it. With OOo’s “writer”, I can copy text from a website and paste it into writer and it will copy over the formatting. Italics, bold, etc… But when I do that with Abiword, all the formatting is lost. Anyone know how to keep the formatting when pasting to Abiword?
“There’s no Gnumeric for Windows that I’m aware of. ”
coming near to you soon
I tried it here and I gave up after about 5 mins of waiting for AbiWord to load the file. Word loaded it instantly as did my old copy of Works 2000. Metapad was just as fast! But after 5 mins AbiWord still hadn’t loaded the file.
They definitely need to work on that…
yeah yeah, I already downloaded the file, and am profiling it… 500+ pages of plain text aren’t normal testcases
can anyone link me to the OS X binaries? All i could find was source for the newest version and the site with all the files is huge.
http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/abiword/AbiWord-2.2.0….
What about a GNOME DTP program. I am sick of QT/Scribus… I wnat a native applicaiton.
Does anyone know if Gnumeric breaks the 256-column barrier?
TIA
It probably never will. At least not from source, what distributions and users do with it is another piece of cake.
More information on why this is can be found at
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/2003/Apr/0167.htm…
(there is more information in the thread – but this post has the gist of it).
Basicly, there’s a problem to have the internals of a program to match 1-1 with the file format, if it does not – you will have data loss. Rewriting the internal datastructures to be compliant with a file format is unlikely to ever happen.
That said, there exists filters for import/export – how good/bad they are I do not know.
Passepartout is out there. But it’s still young.
Upside, Abiword already has an export filter for it.
Thankfully, I don’t have to use a spreadsheet program very often, or I would be in the same predicament, as I refuse to load Gnome or KDE libraries on this older machine. (I don’t plan to run Gnome or KDE. Why should I have to install their libraries?)
I don’t have a problem with Gnome or KDE “integrating” other applications into the desktop environment (e.g., Gnumeric), but where are the alternatives for the rest of us? For instance, I run Feather Linux, which does not install Gnome or KDE libraries. On my dialup connection, installing OpenOffice (overkill for my needs) would take at least five hours. Feather comes with ABS as its spreadsheet, but that application has not been updated for some time, and the hope page no longer seems active. Oleo may be another possibility, but I don’t know how active that project is.
The fact that in certain areas there are few if any alternatives to Gnome or KDE dependent applications (at least they are outdated or very hard to find) reminds me just a bit of a certain other OS that shall remain nameless.