Gnumeric MUCH better than Calc

[honda882000]

I consider myself a heavy Excel user, so when I found out about OpenOffice, I was excited to hear about a free solution to constantly buying newer versions of Excel...I was extremely disappointed :-(

Calc seems to have all the properties of Excel, but it really doens't. Not only is it EXTREMELY slow, but even its "feel" is not right. I started using Calc just as a "Excel file viewer", but not really for doing anything advanced. A few months later and I finally found a true Excel replacement, Gnumeric. Gnumeric is fast and, so far, has all features I need to replace Excel (with the exception of VBA abilities).

I know this post seems pointless, but I wanted to urge all of you whom are tired of Calc's performance and usability to try out Gnumeric. It really made a huge difference for me. OpenOffice seems to be much more well know, even outside the Linux world, but, even though it is a good product, I don't believe it is the best. Does anyone else have any opinions on this matter?

[gn2]

I only recently started using spreadsheets and funnily enough the first spreadsheet application I ever used is Gnumeric which is part of Xubuntu.

I installed Open Office Calc to try it out but found it to be significantly slower to work with than Gnumeric.

My work PC has Excel which is reasonably OK, but I still prefer Gnumeric.

All I need to find out is how to "lock" cells in Gnumeric to stop me deleting formulae by mistake......

[yatt]

In my opinion, both KOffice and Gnome Office are much better than OOo. OOo tends to be one of the first to go on a new install.

[michaelzap]

I always use Gnumeric instead of Calc and AbiWord instead of Writer. Both of these are way faster than their Oo counterparts and do everything I need in a clear and straightforward way. Oo just seems cluttered, inefficient, and ugly in my opinion, which is a shame because I'd really like to be able to recommend it to my MS Office-using friends.

[conehead77]

Calc seems slow to me too and im looking for a alternative. Will try Gnumeric, thanks for the tip :)

[phrostbyte]

Gnumeric is awesome. Also check out it's word processor counterpart, AbiWord. Both are applications in the "Gnome Office" suite. While not as complete as OOo, the development seems to be going in a much better direction.

[yatt]

Gnumeric is awesome. Also check out it's word processor counterpart, AbiWord. Both are applications in the "Gnome Office" suite. While not as complete as OOo, the development seems to be going in a much better direction.Yes, they have planner too. I think they really need to get a PowerPoint/Impress competitor, too.

[HermanAB]

Yup, it depends on what you need to do. Mostly, Gnumeric is good for handling MS Excel spreadsheets. Abiword is OK for simple letters and original documents, but if you have to read an existing MS Word doc, then OOo Writer is better.

[cleniri]

Gnumeric is awesome. Also check out it's word processor counterpart, AbiWord. Both are applications in the "Gnome Office" suite. While not as complete as OOo, the development seems to be going in a much better direction.
I always use Gnumeric and Abiword. They are both much faster than OpenOffice and they look great.

[p_quarles]

For KDE users, the KOffice suite is also much faster than OOo. I keep Writer around for .doc support, but otherwise KSpread and KWord are equally functional and much more responsive.

[eljoeb]

Heh. I was going to psot something exactly like this. Except it was about me trying to get a %@#%#$^% histogram in Calc. Open Office really tests my patience sometimes. Thank the gods for a nice Linux/Windows Dual boot.

[joe.gordon]

Gnumeric is my spreadsheet of choice, but I am having trouble do T-tests and ANOVAs. Does anyone know if this bug has been fixed? Thanks.

[Incense]

For KDE users, the KOffice suite is also much faster than OOo. I keep Writer around for .doc support, but otherwise KSpread and KWord are equally functional and much more responsive.

+1 Koffice is fast, and full featured. Konqueror integration is also fantastic. ON the gnome side, and I am also a fan of Abiword, and Gnumeric.One thing they both lack for me however is a good document recovery. OOo does a great job with this. You'd think I'd learn to move my power strip by now, or at least learn not to kick it.

[multifaceted]

Wow, strange to see how many prefer Gnumeric over Oo Calc!

I have never had a problem with Oo.org apps. I have only used Writer and Calc between my Linux machine and work Xp machines with no problems whatsoever.

I have built -and frequently use- very large spreadsheets with links and automated data pulling with no problems or lag???.... I have 2GB of RAM on all three machines I use, maybe that has something to do with it?

BTW...I am not arguing this post at all, I am just surprised!

[Tomone]

I glad someone posted about this because I'd never even thought of trying out the gnome office apps. Gnumeric is able to do some things that I'd been unable to do with calc, so I'll definitely try it out.

[bailout]

I have to admit to turning to MS office for work and only using linux office apps for basic stuff. As a kde user I installed koffice and much prefer it for speed. I did see some interesting comments about OOo from the point of view of koffice development that indicated the OOo code was a mess and very difficult to work with. It sounds as if the project hasn't been controlled very well and is now difficult to develop further.

[GeneralZod]

I did see some interesting comments about OOo from the point of view of koffice development that indicated the OOo code was a mess and very difficult to work with. It sounds as if the project hasn't been controlled very well and is now difficult to develop further.

Yes, it's supposed to be fairly ... unpleasant. Fun Fact: OO.o's codebase is over 4 times larger than that of KOffice, at 4,248,428 lines of program code vs 986,573 (this is with comments/ documentation stripped, I think).


[1] http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3802?p=KOffice and http://www.ohloh.net/projects/29?p=OpenOffice.org.

[linuxlizard]

My wife was a big "Word" fan and got extremely frustrated with open office writer. So I tried Abiword- she was much happier with the look and feel and menu system.

[bruce89]

It's kind of like Gecko vs. WebKit. OO.o is slow and fat, and GNOME office is fast and light, with better standards support.

[UbuWu]

Gnumeric is my spreadsheet of choice, but I am having trouble do T-tests and ANOVAs. Does anyone know if this bug has been fixed? Thanks.

You mean the program crashes? That has been fixed for me in the Gutsy version.

[clubsoda]

I'd love to join the love-in for Gnumeric and Abiword but the experience so far indicates that there's still quite a bit of work to do:-

Gnumeric
Editing functions is a pain. Like the evil overstriker for example, try changing =sqrt(A4) to =A3+sqrt(A4) and when you click on cell A3 the =sqrt part disappears!?! No parenthesis highlighting so it's back to counting brackets. The "End" key doesn't take you to the end of the line you're editing, etc.
Another biggie for me is the way the cursor moves down a cell after entering a number. Most frustrating if you want to try several different values in the one cell. Yes, you can Ctrl-Enter but monkey is as monkey does, and this monkey sees Gnumeric as about a decade behind Excel.
I need an icon to change the colour of text in a cell without hunting through the menus, so I tried File->Preferences to see if there was a toolbar I could activate, and Gnumeric froze. After about a minute of 100% CPU it disappeared with my work, never to be seen again. Repeatable.
This comment refers to gnumeric-gtk 1.7.11. Maybe I should try the gnome version?

Abiword
Test: Open a japanese word98 document.
Result: Gobbledegook.
This looks like a codepage issue which is not fixed by changing fonts or booting with LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8. Win98 files use ANSI encoding, not UTF. This should be bread-and-butter for a modern word processor.

Hey, I'm still a fan. The reason I persevere with Xfce and Gnumeric is the natural tendency of software to bloat. OpenOffice already seems to have reached the ridiculous stage in that regard. The app's which are lightweight now should be fantastic in the next 2-5 years.

Gnumeric looks very promising. There is already a generous range of functions provided, including complex numbers and some number theory. Major developments still needed include macro scripting and better support for dynamic data delivery from web pages.

[jbrefort]

If you wish new features in gnumeric, please file bugs reports (enhancements are files as bugs) at bugzilla.gnome.org. I agree that ther is much room for editing enhancement.
The toolbar you need for the txt color is available in View/Toolbars. The crash you experienced is a gnumeric-gtk related build. The non gnome build was intended for win32, not unices, and reached stability only very recently. 1.7.11 is a developement version, and can't be expected to be stable. 1.6.3 is the last stable version and 1.8.0 should be out around the end of this year, or early next year.

[clubsoda]

Hi jbrefort,

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my whining list of complaints. Perhaps I owe an apology because as a general rule, I don't believe people should criticize open source software unless they're willing to try and fix the problems or add new features themselves, something I'm not volunteering to do for gnumeric at this point in time. Unfortunately, when you combine the time it takes to install and configure things with the frustration of software not behaving as expected, it's easy to forget that you're still essentially getting something for free.

Why was I using a development GTK version of the software? Looking through my Synaptic package history, I never chose that version so it must have been a standard component of Xubuntu Edgy and has been upgraded a few times since then. Checking the package list (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/gutsy/release/xubuntu-7.10-alternate-i386.list), I notice that gnumeric-gtk is still there in the Gutsy release, so anyone running Xubuntu will have the buggy version. The idea would have been to avoid the "heavy" Gnome libraries, however I have now switched to the Gnome version gnumeric_1.7.11-1ubuntu3. This is working better.

I can see the text colour format icon you mentioned. Depending on window size, it folds into a pull-down menu on the right. Good to know it's there.

I'm reluctant to post a feature suggestion as a bug but I just found the gnumeric-list (http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list) for discussions via e-mail so maybe I'll join up.

Here's the funny part... File->Preferences->Tools->Enter_Moves_Selection. Yippee! Just what I was looking for, but when I set it to "none", the cursor moves up each time instead of staying put. A real bug? :D Oh, the irony. :D

[mdsmedia]

Hi jbrefort,

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my whining list of complaints. Perhaps I owe an apology because as a general rule, I don't believe people should criticize open source software unless they're willing to try and fix the problems or add new features themselves...{snip}

While I don't tend to complain about OSS, but rather look for alternatives or others' views etc, I don't agree that criticism is a bad thing, and I don't think it depends on your willingness to try and fix the problems or add new features yourself. This comes from an accountant who has no idea about programming other than the little bit I did at college.

Programmers aren't the only OSS users so that isn't always an alternative. But, as I said, I don't tend to criticise OSS anyway. I wait for the next version and see what happens, or look for alternatives which MAY be better.

I've been a heavy spreadsheet user since the early Lotus 123 days. I've been an avid critic of Excel, because I like to be. I've used OOo almost exclusively on my own computers for several years and recently tried Gnumeric. I like its speed but still use OOo because I trust it for Excel files I get from work etc. I haven't given Gnumeric much work, yet, so I can't really compare the two. And I haven't used Koffice at all...being a Gnome user. I like the lightness of Gnumeric, but I wonder, because of its lightness, whether it has the capacity of OOo.

I've used Abiword about as much as Gnumeric, and I quite like it too, but it had a problem with a reasonably large document I'd converted from PDF. From memory I then opened the document in OOo to finish what I was doing. I can't remember how/why/what I did to convert from PDF and then open it in OOo.

[jbrefort]

Just my idea is that criticism is useless, but feedback about what is not ideal is important. FOSS is a domain where programmers and users can and should communicate.
Personnally, I have been using gnumeric since 0.9 (I don't remember when this was). It fulfills my needs (I don't need pivot tables or macros). I've tried kcalc and oocalc, but feel they don't fit my needs as gnumeric does, may be because I used already gnumeric... And, of course, now that I've contributed to it, even modestly, I love it :)

[Snoober]

I also vote for Gnumeric and Abiword. Both are faster and have a better "feel" then OpenOffice.