I'm always looking for interesting, useful applications to feature here on The Daily Ubuntu. Please send in your name, website address, and application, along with a few reasons why you suggest it, and I'd love to feature you on the site.
Gnumeric is a spreadsheet application included as a part of the GNOME Office suite. It supports a slew of different formats, including Microsoft Excel, CSV, OpenDocument, and LaTeX, just to name a few. It copies most of the features available in the more ubiquous, proprietary spreadsheet programs, including charts, random number generation, statistical analysis, styling, and batch processing.
As many of you know, I work at a job that requires me to use Microsoft Excel by force. I strongly dislike Excel. Therefore, I'm proud to announce that Gnumeric supports 100% of the worksheet functions in .xls documents, and has 154 functions not included in Microsoft's program. The Gnumeric team is working on adding support for Pivot tables.
Gnumeric is a good alternative to OpenOffice.org on legacy machines who may not have a lot of RAM and resources to spare. In my own experience, Gnumeric was more responsive than OpenOffice on a 64MB machine running Ubuntu Gutsy in an Openbox environment.
Statistical analysis is one of the strongest selling points for Gnumeric. A recent report (warning: .pdf) by B.D. McCullough from LeBow College of Business at Drexel University suggests that Gnumeric has less statistical errors than Excel and is more responsive in correcting them:
The open source spreadsheet package 'Gnumeric' was such a good clone of Microsoft Excel that it even had errors in its statistical functions similar to those in Excel's statistical functions. When apprised of the errors in v1.0.4, the developers of Gnumeric indicated that they would try to fix the errors. Indeed, Gnumeric v1.1.2, has largely fixed its flaws, while Microsoft has not fixed its errors through many successive versions. Persons who desire to use a spreadsheet package to perform statistical analyses are advised to use Gnumeric rather than Excel.
Microsoft 0, Open-Source 1. Seriously though, I wish I had professors who told me to use open-source software instead of bloated, half-functional proprietary software.
And that concludes my Microsoft bashing for the day.
Gnumeric also offers a plug-in system that allows developers to add functionality such as real time data analysis. It offers complex function definition with Perl, Python, and Guile. You can export spreadsheets in almost any format, including the native XML format.
Getting Gnumeric requires you to pop open the Terminal and to type the following:
sudo apt-get install gnumericI'd like to hear more about the applications you use to replace those applications that proprietary users claim they can't live without. What luck have you had adopting Linux and Open Source programs into your computing paradigm, and what would you suggest to those who are about to make the leap?
13 comments:
For IM I use Gaim/Pidgin and pretty much it does a great job. And GIMP is great also.
If it doesn't include a feature as mandatory these days as a pivot table, then I imagine it's also missing other core features.
But perhaps not. It's great that they've got all the spreadsheet functions for sure (and I wonder if they fixed the goofy ones?).
At any rate, for my users this thing falls short by at least an inch. Seems like we're always an inch away from being able to dump MS.
Gnumeric looks like a fine piece of software, however for many large corporations, excel is not simply a "spreadsheet", it's an entire programming platform. I've seen all kinds of highly complex applications written in Excel VBA, and until Gnumeric supports an equally "powerful" and "user friendly" (aka non-programmer friendly) system, including code generation from recorded macros, no company is going to take it seriously for complex business tasks.
And ditto with the comment above - a spreadsheet without pivot tables is so '80s...
Hey, does anybody know ANY open source spreadsheet software that will let me run VBA stuff? I'd even be happy if I could open an xls spreadsheet in some other software, run my VBA whatever, and then save it and open with OOo or Gnumeric. I'd LOVE to switch, but I just can't do that one thing. Goldarnit.
Pivot tables are one of the most important features of Excel in enterprise environments.
"Microsoft 0, Open-Source 1. ... half-functional proprietary software."
Do you pride yourself on being biased? Your article is ridiculous. The most important features of Excel are missing from Gnumeric.
Pivot tables and programmability are key features for businesses. Gnumeric is absolutely unsuitable for this kind of business use because its Python API is incomplete and also in flux.
Until Gnumeric is suitable for the vast majority of Excel users, not just some home users and hackers who demand very little in terms of spreadsheet functionality, it's Excel: 100, Gnumeric: 1.
I don't understand why certain open source advocates think they have to be RIDICULOUSLY TOTALLY IN FAVOR OF OPEN SOURCE to the extent that they poorly analyze the advantages of proprietary software and push opinions that are basically wrong. You don't do the OSS movement any favors by spouting anti-proprietary FUD.
What the world needs is more balanced views.
I guess the focus here on this blog is a bit different than what I'm conveyed so far. I really try to focus on the end-user, individual market for applications. I don't know the corporate side, and would be cheating my readers if I pretended I did.
Businesses have done some amazing things with Excel. Programs for risk analysis, stock exchange, linear regression, and statistical hypothesis testing make Excel a powerful tool. Pivot tables are incredibly useful for complete data analysis: they've saved my many data-driven papers from going down the drain for me. For business, Excel is a decent tool. I could argue full database software (MySQL, Oracle, Access) or stat software (SPSS, SAS, etc) could do the job better, but I won't. In terms of corporate usefulness, you've convinced me.
But Excel isn't any fun for the non-corporate end user. And it's no fun for the business student either: my university won't roll out Excel 2007 due to a basic division error that occurs in estimating linear regression coefficients. And in business and economics, that's kind of major. Excel is a bit heavy, a bit bloated, and could really use an "Excel Lite" for home users. Gnumeric may be a tangible answer for that.
Half-functional sounds harsh, but how do you address the fact that Microsoft has not moved to correct serious mathematical errors? Open-source programs surely have programs, bugs, and math errors as well, but in this case they were fixed faster and more effectively than Microsoft could/chose to.
Python may or may not be constantly in flux; I'm not a developer, and don't have that knowledge. But what about Perl? Isn't that a more established, more consistent language? I'd love some input.
Justin, please don't make the fallacy of composition here. My dislike of ONE proprietary program/operating system/company does NOT necessary mean I dislike all proprietary software. And my like for some open-source doesn't mean I support all open-source. There is a time and a place, and every case is unique, my friend.
For the most part an average user would be able to get by with just the spreadsheet functions, and if you can that great. More advance things like pivot tables and programing will most likely require Excel for the time being. It can be done in open office but I have already spent years in creating my VBA arsenal that recreating the wheel in OO would tkae to long.
Hi Mary,
> But Excel isn't any fun for the non-corporate end user.
It's hard to objectively discuss "fun" :-) What makes Gnumeric more fun?
> And it's no fun for the business student either: my university won't roll out Excel 2007 due to a basic division error that occurs in estimating linear regression coefficients.
Is there a problem with Excel 2003? Either way, non sequitur.
Do you have a reference about the math bug? I haven't been able to find anything on Google.
> And in business and economics, that's kind of major.
I guess I don't understand what problems you're implying students will have with it.
> Excel is a bit heavy, a bit bloated, and could really use an "Excel Lite" for home users.
I think that would be a good idea, but I'm not sure what makes you feel it's bloated in the first place. Most office programs tend to be very large, because they have a lot of features. What aspect of Excel's bloat negatively impacts users?
> Half-functional sounds harsh, but how do you address the fact that Microsoft has not moved to correct serious mathematical errors?
I don't know what serious mathematical errors Microsoft has not corrected. If you're referring to the problems with numbers near 65,000, those were corrected two weeks after discovery. I don't claim Excel has no math bugs, but I certainly don't know of any and would appreciate a reference.
We should not commit the fallacy of arguing based on anecdote, when discussing whether open source or proprietary software has better or quicker patch rates. It is a bit unfair to say "in this case they were fixed faster and more effectively than ... Microsoft could". What bugs are we talking about? Did the same bug occur in both programs?
I did not mean to imply that Python is unstable. I meant that the Python-Gnumeric interface is unstable (in the sense of a "stable branch"). If you write programs for your Gnumeric spreadsheet, you might have to rewrite them next month.
> Justin, please don't make the fallacy of composition here
I was not making the fallacy of composition so much as generalizing about the behavior of open source advocates in general. They tend to ignore the downsides of software they favor, and exaggerate the downsides of software they dislike.
As a consumer of software, I see it as a tool. I want to find the best tool for the job. It is in everyone's best interests for OSS to present its strengths and weaknesses honestly. We OSS developers do not have a vested interest in convincing people to use our products; for me (at least) it's about helping the community. Sometimes a person is best helped by pointing him to the software he needs, even if it is not my own.
I guess what I am saying is that Gnumeric's accomplishment is awesome however you look at it. There is no need for exaggeration and hyperbole when comparing it to Excel.
I have not sat down and compared the two, but I find it very unlikely that Gnumeric has even most of the features of Excel. Not all of Excel's features are "basic" and "out in front". They might be the formatting options when editing some obscure piece of a chart; or the auto-suggestions when editing a formula; or the debugging tools when trying to fix a broken formula; or being able to select a couple of cells and a chart, copy it, and paste it into a word processing app. Then editing the cells right inside that application and seeing the chart update, then editing the chart, etc. Can Gnumeric support that?
Gnumeric's accomplishments stand on their own merits. Let's not imply that its purpose is to copy Excel by defining its goodness in those terms :-)
Hi,
I'd like to advocate the Add/remove application in the GNOME Menu. Instead of:
> Getting Gnumeric requires you to pop open the Terminal and to type the following...
Maybe you could write:
< Getting Gnumeric is as easy as clicking Add/remove in the Applications menu -> write "Gnumeric" -> mark it for installation and press OK.
The terminal is never required for these standard tasks and we need not to continue claiming that it is - we have enough of those rumors from history.
Actually - this add/remove menu/feature is one of the things I most often talk about as the best aspect of Ubuntu - almost any application in the universe is just a few clicks away.
Thanks!
Thanks for the information, I'm newbie here on Ubuntu. Can you show me the software can create an archive with password like winrar?
What about Excel's annoying 65k row limit, does gnumeric fix that? What's their limit?
Also, when you are using a spreadsheet on the side (calculations and list management) note that when you cut-n-paste from gnumeric, it doesn't add a newline to the end of your cell as OO.o does.
I don't have a copy of MS Excel. I do all spreadsheets in OO.o and gnumeric -- quasi-randomly. I don't have a clear preference and don't use all those functions.
The fact that I can switch between spreadsheets arbitrarily is a good sign.
I love open source, both as a user and a developer. Gnumeric has a serious flaw for me, and that is a bug that when sorting data gets mangled across rows. This is just an anecdote, but finding a bug like this decreased my trust in the application. I am embarrassed to say that I don't know if the bug has been fixed, but I can't devote myself to reading through the code of every application I want to use.
gnuplot is awesome. After I run tests, I run a bashscript to put the data into a gnuplot input file that I can simply load in gnuplot. WAY easier and faster and with better results than copy/pasting via excel. Of course, I have no idea how to use excel properly. My fellow developers at work are not awesome excel users, either (we almost all use linux and emacs/vim to code C++, and many are tons more proficient with shell commands and systemy-things). Just as I learn from them, I try to pass on the good word about gnuplot. Nonetheless, excel is pretty deep rooted.
Also, for a while I liked google spreadsheet, but I no longer trust web applications that can access all my data and correlate it with my searching terms and other web behavior.
(don't forget: access gmail via https)
ps - I loved the Inkscape post, and I think the general idea of promoting open source programs to the general public is awesome. This post is particularly weak, even taking the business perspective out of the picture, but that's just my opinion. Keep up the good work!!
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