NewsForge Reviews Excel Clone for Linux

martin-k writes "NewsForge has a glowing review about PlanMaker for Linux, a new spreadsheet for Linux that is much more compatible with Microsoft Excel than the competition and speedier, too. PlanMaker has Excel-compatible charting and AutoShapes and reads and writes any Excel file you throw at it. Here is a chart comparing Excel, OpenOffice.org, and PlanMaker." Yes, Virginia, NewsForge is also part of OSDN, like Slashdot.

Interesting....

[Luscious868]

I think I'll look at it. Sometimes OpenOffice.org chockes on certain Excel spreadsheets that I try to open in it. I'm curious to see if this will do any better.

Let me be the first

[Apreche]

Let me be the first to say what everyone else is gearing up to say.

gnumeric exists. Acknowledge both its existence and superiority in the world of spreadsheets.

Pfft

[Anonymous Coward]

50 bux for a spreadsheet app? I'll stick with the free Gnumeric [gnome.org] instead.

They left out Gnumeric

[Travis Fisher]

One of the best spreadsheets for linux, gnumeric [gnome.org] has support for 100% of Excel's functions as well as most of its other features. Its one of the highest quality and most stable pieces of software I've ever seen for linux. Its amazing they overlooked this as competition.

Re:More sense

[Sique]

In this case the question is simply wrong. SoftMaker is around longer than most software companies. I remember the first SoftMaker adverts in a PC magazine in 1987, where they announced their TextMaker for 149,- DM (Deutschmark), which was a 5th of the usual price for a text processing software at the time. Germany had always several small office productivity companies, and one of them brought us on the road to OpenOffice (StarDivision, now bought by SUN), and SoftMaker is also still alive and kicking, working from the beginning with a "sell cheap, sell enough" model for their software.

They survived all the storms of time by getting large contracts with public administrations like towns and counties. And there they probably got most of their bugreports from, because a town administration can be sure to get lots of quite strange documents, in content and in form.

Re:For scientific calculations, clones are useless

[Sweetshark]

can't someone figure out a smart solution for this without asking the user to modify the source themselves?
If you need more than 64k of data use a app made for scientific work, like R [r-project.org], mupad [mupad.com] or Mathematica [osu.edu].

Re:Interesting....

[Tarantolato]

This has nothing to do with the open source community. It's a proprietary app that happens to run on Linux. Also, OpenOffice spreadsheet already weakened userbase of Gnumeric, which was and is a better and more compatible app. I don't see you whining about that.

Comprehensive compatibility list?

[chrysrobyn]

Does anyone maintain a list of features OO doesn't support?

I know that the only incompatibility I found was when I had a formula that referred to a calculated value in another tab, and then yet another cell that referred to the first formula, I got an error when I opened the file in Excel. When I opened it in Excel, went to the formula and hit enter, it recalculated and got a non-error.

To example, sheet 1 A1 = 1, sheet 1 A2 = A1 * 2, sheet 2 A1 = sheet 1 A2 * 4, sheet 2 A2 = sheet 2 A1 * 5. In this example, sheet 2 A2 is an error in all versions of Excel I could find, and was good as of all versions of OO I could find last December.

I always got the OO errors about how data may be lost by saving in the non-native file format, but aside from the above case, I never lost any content.

Re:How long can this last?

[Sique]

Not until software patents are valid in Germany. There is still a certain way to go. Of course Microsoft could stop the distribution in the U.S. by legal means, but SoftMakers market right now is Germany, and they are slowly expanding to the E.U.

Re:More sense

[Sique]

You can charge money. You just have to provide the sourcecode. See the GNU FAQ [gnu.org]. You can't change the license because you got other people's work with this license and THEY have to agree to the change.

numeric package for science, DB for accouting

[Sweetshark]

Its usability is way low compared to spreadsheets.
Thats just wrong - it depends on the task. Spreadsheets are the right tools for a budget calulation resulting in a nice formatted table for the boss. If you have more then 64K lines of data, you should use something like R, mupad, mathematica or octave - simply because they are more useable for this task - 64k lines of data do not need a pretty layout - they will (almost) never get printed - they need a tool to be transparently processed. Spreadsheets dont do this well (for example, you will hardly ever notice it if a cell was left out in a "Edit->Fill->Down" maneuver or if the formula in a cell was accedently modified while moving over the sheet). A high-level numerical computation language is far superior here. And BTW, if someone claims to be unable to use these high-level tools, I would hardly trust his/her "research".
64k lines is enough for everybody - because speadsheets with more than 5-10k lines are not savely manageable. Use a numeric package for these, if you do science or a database if you do accouting.
Always use the right tools for the job.

Re:The Row Limit is Definitely Frustrating

[martin-k]

I've always wondered why this limit exists. If anyone can enlighten me about the technical reasons, that would be much appreciated.

Performance. We will increase PlanMaker's row limit (basically, the sky is the limit) once we have tweaked certain routines, like sorting and transposing.

So you are using Excel as a database?

[RAMMS+EIN]

``99% of the sheets I use here involve macros to open many .csv files, process the data in a particular way and then dump it all into pivot tables that are linked to other Excel spreadsheets.''

That sounds like a database to me. Using Excel as a database is one of the most harmful things there are. It's slow, eats a lot of memory, and I have seen entire databases go to hell because of slight bugs in the macros or the interpreter.

Re:hmm

[martin-k]

Speed. Price. Multi-platform support -- there are even versions for Pocket PCs and Handheld PCs, and we are also working on a Zaurus port. [softmaker.com]

Included with SUSE 9.1

[Roger Whittaker]

This (and the company's word processor, textmaker) are included in the boxed version of SUSE 9.1 Professional.

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[Mitchell Mebane]

We already have it. It's called KParts. :D

It works well for me

[Guenhwyvar]

I have some xls files that contain a several graphs that are generated from thousands of data points.

• Open Office takes 10 minutes or more to open them.
• Gnumeric opens them quickly but doesn't draw the graphs correctly.
• KSpread doesn't draw the graphs.

However, I just tried the trial version of PlanMaker for LInux and it had no trouble displaying the graphs exactly as they should and was able to open even the largest file in just a few seconds.

Horay for a viable alternative, even if it is not open source.

Re:Macros rear their ugly head again.

[bigbird]

I'm sorry, but if these data handling functions are business critical, then you need a proper database (sql, basically) combined with proper data in/out.

Unfortunately, in the investment banking arena where I work, use of Excel to make financial decisions is extremely common - and is unlikely to change. Analysts love Excel for modelling, and the alternative - using developers who don't understand their financial models - also has its dangers.

Re:CLI

[Jody Goldberg]

Gnumeric includes just that
ssconvert foo.xls foo.csv

Re:Obvious question

[Jody Goldberg]

1) not open source
2) They certainly have good filters for such a young project, but the claim of _better_ seems questionable. The test cases they provide are not consistent with my testing of the beta.

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[Jody Goldberg]

We run on osx www.openosx.com
and cvs head is ready and all of its dependencies compile under win32 with gtk-2.4.x. We're very very close to getting a release out.

Re:The Row Limit is Definitely Frustrating

[Jody Goldberg]

- download gnumeric
- edit SHEET_MAX_ROWS in gnumeric.h
- compile

Re:Interesting....

[Jody Goldberg]

amen

Unfortunately it's a non-trivial amount of work to write a vba clone. Not impossible by any means, but it does require a community to do it. We started the gb project years ago, but it faded away without real progress. I'm currently pinning my hopes on mono and it's basic implementation.

Re:Any bets..

[aristotle-dude]

Stop spreading FUD. I dislike MS and there tactics as much as the next guy but the format has not changed for several years now and only when they needed to add new features.