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FOSS spreadsheet hands-on comparison

Submitted by stro on Thu, 2005-05-12 11:32. Gnumeric

Rumors about the capabilities of free and open source spreadsheets are common among office software users, but not all of the rumors are backed by hands-on experience with the products. To get a better sense of the current state of FOSS spreadsheets, I installed the latest versions available for Debian: build 1.9.83 of the OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta (for OpenOffice.org Calc), KSpread 1.3.5, and Gnumeric 1.4.3 (for Gnumeric). Some of what I found contradicts the common wisdom.

Read the rest

Gnumeric is the best.

Submitted by Anonymous George on Fri, 2005-05-13 11:08.

Gnumeric is so good, I have a hard time believing anyone would pay for an alternative program, i.e. Excel. The statistical analysis tools are what I like: mulitple linear regression, fourier analysis, etc... very fast and very good.

Gnumeric also useful for rare newbie use

Submitted by Anonymous George on Fri, 2005-05-13 10:59.

I very rarely use a spreadsheet, but when I have to create tax information for my accountant, Gnumeric has been very easy to use and exports Excel formatted data that is easy for others to use. It is an excellent program.

Gnumeric is excellent

Submitted by Anonymous George on Fri, 2005-05-13 08:39.

Gnumeric is far better than any of the other free spreadsheets. It is only a few features (and a bit of polish) short of being a general Excel replacement. It is quite amazing, because Gnumeric doesn't seem to have a massive level of corporate support (unlike other parts of the GNOME platform), just dilligent and focused developers.

I wish other parts of the platform were as well crafted as Gnumeric, but that's another story...

Graph support?

Submitted by FooBarWidget on Fri, 2005-05-13 14:27.

Does Gnumeric have decent graph support yet? Last time I checked it was hard to edit graph data or modify the way graphs look. :( I need graphs for things like writing reports for physics/chemistry.

Yes

Submitted by l___ on Sat, 2005-05-14 01:43.

It's way better than it was a couple of years ago. Try again.

It's all in one dialog -- tip: right-click on the chart, then click on different features in the treeview, then try the "Add" button -- it's context sensitive. A little different than other programs, but most features you'll need are in there.

I had to work on large data s

Submitted by Anonymous George on Fri, 2005-05-13 04:06.

I had to work on large data sets resulting from PDE calculations and needed to be able to handle these sets to the customer in xls-format.

Summary: After playing around with OO Calc 1.1.4 and Gnumeric 1.4.3 I chose the latter one because it exports Graphs better to Excel and it "feels" better. It starts up fast and is very reactive. I was deeply impressed by the quality of the application. I only hope that graph exporting to Excel still improves.

Yep, OOCalc is slow as an old

Submitted by l___ on Fri, 2005-05-13 09:46.

Yep, OOCalc is slow as an old dog at redrawing, and it doesn't double-buffer -- you can watch it redraw the screen; it flickers. Scrolling can be jumpy when there are graphs. That gives a feeling of unprofessionalism.

Gnumeric is smooth as honey -- no flicker, no jumpiness. It just "feels right".

Gnumeric page formatting bugs by Anonymous George

A Gnumeric view on that article

Submitted by Anonymous George on Thu, 2005-05-12 20:56.

That comparison is fine as far as it goes, but it simply doesn't go far enough. See
my blog entry about this.

Yep, for common, useful and p

Submitted by Scarlet on Fri, 2005-05-13 00:53.

Yep, for common, useful and productive tasks gnumeric is beyond compare. But it just isn't pretty enough damnit.

Gnumeric's accuracy and numer

Submitted by _tmp on Thu, 2005-05-12 14:41.

Gnumeric's accuracy and numerical stability is dramatically higher than any other spreadsheet, on any platform, AFAIK. Part of this is that it borrows numerical code from R (and I think LAPACK). Some of this is actually being rolled into OOCalc. Gnumeric is going to be spinning off a calculation engine library that can be used by other projects, so that other F/OSS apps can benefit.

The other important point is that Gnumeric has 100% Excel function compatibility (albeit with higher numeric accuracy). I think the other sheets are in the high 90's.

The conclusion to the article didn't seem congruous with the rest of the article. It did not appear to me that Calc came out on top in "more than half the categories". It appeared that Calc and Gnumeric were comparable in the areas the author looked at. So -- do you need the whole suite, or do you just need a spreadsheet? Realistically, how many people actually embed a live spreadsheet table (and not just copy-pasted static data) in their wordprocessor, or a wordprocessor-managed text field in their spreadsheet? Nobody does that anymore, OLE is too clunky. Gnumeric is clean lightweight, and is one of the truly stellar examples of Free software.

Gimp, abiword, dia by Anonymous George

dbus? by Anonymous George

Abiword 1.4.3?

Submitted by mini on Thu, 2005-05-12 12:55.

Surely this is wrong. There is no Abiword 1.4.3 around...

Contradicts common wisdom indeed :-)

[Edit: Article says gnumeric 1.4.3-6 now, so only this summary is wrong.]

/Mikael

Corrected

Submitted by stro on Thu, 2005-05-12 14:47.

Yep, they must have corrected it.