OSS spreadsheets, but easier?

**hizaguchi** · February 13th, 2007

I've been writing large papers and lab reports with Word / Abiword / OpenOffice for a long time, but now that I've found LyX (and I'm slowly learning LaTeX) I realize that my life could have been much simpler.

That's got me wondering if there is software that can likewise simplify my light numerical work and presentation-grade graphing needs. Excel, OpenOffice Calc, and even Gnumeric work decently well, but they are obviously not designed for complicated math (I have to use Kate to type up big equations and just paste them into the cells) and making a really nice graph can be alot of work. I could also use Matlab / Octave / Scilab, but that requires more work to do things (like trendlines) that spreadsheet software usually handles automatically, and it also makes finding errors more involved than just skimming over a sheet of numbers and looking for something out of place. Normally, I'd just deal with the clunkiness of my spreadsheet UI and get on with my life, but LyX has spoiled me so much that I figure there has to be something better than Excel. I'm sifting through the SAL website, but the list of software is huge and I'm lazy, so if anyone can save me some effort with a suggestion I'd really appreciate it.

**machoo02** · February 14th, 2007

What about gnuplot? I have not used it myself, but I've heard that it can produce publication quality graphics.

**vigleik** · February 14th, 2007

Latex is really the way to go. You can type arbitrarily complicated math expressions, and with a little work it'll look very professional. As you've probably figured out already there's a bit of a learning curve, but it sounds like you're in a situation where it'll pay back.

Nothing else comes close when it comes to typing math, and just about every math paper is prepared using latex. It really makes what you type that much more professional. I like using Kile as my latex frontend, but you can really use anything. Emacs, vim, kate, or...lyx.

**hizaguchi** · February 14th, 2007

Hmm, I'll have to check into Gnuplot some more, but I've never been able to make an attractive graph from it. I've had better luck with R. I may be missing something though.

I agree that LaTeX is awesome, but I need something else to do my graphing and data reduction from my ME senior lab reports (which I'm writing with LyX). I've been using OpenOffice Calc, but it is clunky and I was hoping for something geared more toward this kind of usage rather than making pie charts.

**hizaguchi** · February 23rd, 2007

I'd now like to apologize to the geniuses who created and maintain Gnumeric. I finally sat down and figured out how to do everything I used to rely on Excel for, as well as a few neat tricks I never knew were possible. It took some effort to get used to the very different way of doing things in Gnumeric, but it turns out that all of those differences are very logical and I'm already starting to prefer them to Excel/Calc... especially when several data sets are involved in one graph. Speaking of which, with a little tinkering I've figured out how to make some very attractive graphs in Gnumeric as well, and the ability to easily export them as image files with a right click is perfect for planting them in my LyX documents.

It used to be that Kate was the only application I couldn't find a decent replacement for when I had to use a Windows machine. Turns out that Gnumeric is even more unique for me.