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.

Pretty Cool

[JoeShmoe950]

This is a great step forwards. Way to go guys! I can't wait to download it and give it a go. The more compatability, the better...

Any bets..

[bugmenot]

on how long it will take until MS changes Excel to make it incompatible with this application?
My guess is that they will release a new security patch for Excel within a month.

For scientific calculations, clones are useless

[stroustrup]

The greatest limitation of excel for scientific calculations is that number of rows is limited to 64k.

I was hoping the open source or free versions would overcome this limitation but none of them do so as this makes them incompatible with excel.
can't someone figure out a smart solution for this without asking the user to modify the source themselves??

Remember This Marketing Strategy

[illuminata]

Write up a story that makes your software shine brighter than the sun, submit it to Slashdot, and reap the benefits!

Hey, the guy who wrote this software clone did it. What do you bet that if it clones something that Microsoft's done and runs on Linux, it'll always make the main page? I bet they have scripts that look for them and automatically slap them up!

Shit, what Microsoft product hasn't been cloned for Linux yet? I want to make some fast cash! Let me know so I can get coding...

Obvious question

[mrjb]

We all assume that once it being a Linux product, it's open source, but I see nothing in the article mentioning that it is. So.

Is it open source?

Second, they claim better Excel compatibility than OOo, how did they manage this.

Maybe they licensed some code?

I like having good compatibility, from a technical point of view, we are only going to benefit from better compatibility if there is documentation on how it was achieved. Could anyone mail OOo a link to those specs?

Shameless.

[Raven42rac]

This is utterly shameless. You can save things in compatibilty mode in excel, so that they can be read by previous versions of the software, most users know this already. How the hell is it OOO's fault if the file is password protected? The chart is from the company that makes the software, not a unbiased third party, I could craft a document that would work better in one program or the other, I have not seem OOO stoop to that level. And another thing, Planmaker costs money $50 USD or Euro. This is an advertisement masked as an article.

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[Anonymous Coward]

As the vast bulk of the excel spreadsheets I deal with are embedded in word documents, the "bundling" in Open Office is far more important to me than anything else, and Open Office's excel compatibility is already "good enough" for most people.

This is what FreeDesktop.org people need to realise: The single MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do is agree on a standard Linux component embedding (OLE/COM) technology, and then maybe one day people _will_ have the choice of using gnumeric instead of OOo Calc to read excel data embedded in word documents being edited in OOo Writer. But
it DOESN'T WORK YET.

Microsoft just dictates their OLE in their normal stalinist style, but we can't. So we need to have a lively technical debate, and then broad agreement on a baseline set. I recommend specifying protocol, not binary API, in the normal X fashion, but make it good!

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[tashanna]

As much as I applaud Gnumeric for their great implementation, it's still a Linux/Unix only implementation. PlanMaker and OO are both cross-platform for those who can't ditch Windows. If a user can't leave Windows behind, that places Gnumeric out of the running.

I don't care about Excel, what about OO

[OYAHHH]

Can it open OpenOffice spreadsheets? And how fast can it do it?

As a person who writes software which can read/write OO files I see a couple reasons why OO sheets may tend to read/write more slowly.

- The OO files are compressed zip files. Gotta spend a few precious seconds uncompressing them.

- The files contain very verbose XML which has to be parsed. My guess is that Excel sheets in a lot of cases have far fewer bytes to accomplish the same thing.

Re:I don't care about Excel, what about OO

[martin-k]

OpenOffice filters are being worked on, they aren't finished yet, though.

Re:Interesting....

[eyeye]

What linux actually needs is a spreadsheet app that can run VBA.

From working in a large company I can say that most people only ever used a small number of features - excel becomes a requirement because "programmers" write utilities in VBA!

Surely being VBA compatible wouldnt be that hard, it is a joke of a language.

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[XeRXeS-TCN]

This is true, but if you're limited to Windows, there's a case to just use MS Office. If you're looking for cheap (free) implementations, OpenOffice is certainly the way to go, and PlanMaker is certainly something to consider, but if you're going to go with a closed-source application on a Windows platform *anyway*, it makes sense (as much as it's uncharacteristic to admit it) to consider MS Office as a full office package. After all, if you're on Windows, you won't necessarily have too much issue with the concept of proprietary software, especially as a business, so why fight with emulation and whether your alternatives can handle all the Excel stuff properly? Why not use MS Office, where you don't have compatibility issues? You've got the choice to use something else, which is good, but on the Windows platform, you also have the choice of considering MS Office.

No support for macros

[wytcld]

The review says it has no support for macros.

What sort of serious spreadsheet user doesn't employ macros?

And they're selling it for Linux - a platform where most users know how to do a bit of scripting.

If I were in a Linux shop and had to do power-user type spreadsheet stuff, and this were the only Linux option, it would be enough to motivate me to sneak in a copy of Windows so I could get my job done efficiently.

Re:gnumeric it is too good

[kasperd]

Softmaker provide the xls files on their web page.

Chosing test files is part of the comparision. I wouldn't be surprised if the result would look differently by trying a set of xls files relevant for your own work. Of course in my case that set would be empty, I can't remember when I last came across an xls file. If I ever need to open such a file it will probably be because somebody email me one, there is no way I'm going to pay this amount of money for a program to read a file somebody send to me. At least I learned one thing from this discussion, if I ever need to read such a file, I should try both gnumeric and ooo.

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[Anonymous Coward]

KParts make the same mistake as microsoft OLE - they work on the concept of particular programs being associated with embedded data. What should be the case, is the embedded data should have a mimetype, and _any_ embeddable program that can handle that mimetype should be able to edit it-the parent program should query for a data handler i.e. specify protocol, not method.

Re:The Row Limit is Definitely Frustrating

[1u3hr]

I frequently need to work with extremely large amounts of data (for example, data collected in the field can have millions upon millions of rows). There are work-arounds, but they typically result in me having to whip up a program in C that I will use only once. In a spreadsheet program, the same thing would take me much less time because I am doing something that really should be done with a spreadsheet application.

Actually, I venture that you really should be doing it in a database program. Spreadsheets are basically WYSIWYG, you use the mouse to do stuff to slabs of data you can see, but there is no way you can do that with millions of rows.

Much simpler to keep clean code too, when you just have a few lines or pages of code, as opposed to embedding it in a huge spreadsheet.

This seems a bit like the people who try to lay out books in PhotoShop, because that's what they know, rather than using PageMaker or the like.

MS Office Doesn't Stink

[BoomerSooner]

Actually it's an excellent product. Granted the Mac Version is better (amazing by how much), but it is in my opinion the best office suite available. My only complaint is the price.

I like OpenOffice as well, however I never use any features that would conflict between OO and MS Office with the exception of passwords. However, you should never use an MS password if what your storing is actually important. Downloading cracking tools is very easy and free (astalavista.box.sk). Real encryption is necessary for critical documents/spreadsheets not the garbage built into access/excel/word. I've cracked so many competitors stupid presentation info it's sad really that they trust adding a password at all (pdf's as well).

MS Office is great but overkill for my company so we just use OO and it works well and is missing any license violations/bsa audits.

Excel's power

[MoronGames]

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been programming with Visual Basic and Excel Spreadsheets for a major corporation (The Visual Basic + Excel part is not by choice). I have really learned about how powerful Excel is.

I think the main thing Open Source spreadsheet programs need to compete with Excel is something fully compatible with Visual Basic code, as crappy as it might be. Or at least something to migrate from the Visual Basic to some other kind of scripting language with the same functionality.

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnumeric sucks in one crucial way: it is a Gnome app which makes it as bloated and memory hungry as OOo if you use a light weight WM.

I love Linux but I absolutely hate Gnome and KDE and especially applications that require either one to function.

Graphs and Charts for Scientific Publication

[Linuxathome]

There is definitely a niche that needs to be filled (translation: make money here) -- pseudo-spreadsheets that generate best-fit curves for scientific publications. All of the more useful and intuitive applications such as GraphPad Prism [curvefit.com], Sigmaplot, Kaleidagraph, and SlideWrite are (or were) applications developed in Windows and do not have Linux ports. These applications are geared towards non-math-centric researchers who need to generate good looking plots and line graphs without getting into the hard core formulae needed to do it. In other words, they don't want (nor have the time) to learn gnuplot, octave, Maple V, Mathematica to generate non-linear regression plots for biological data -- after all, they're not mathematicians, they're biologists.

As a grad student in biomedical sciences, this is one of the obstacles preventing me from working in Linux solely. I still need my laptop with XP because it still runs Excel and Prism, which I need to publish papers. I don't care about Excel all that much since it generates crappy plots anyway, what I would like to have is a Prism clone. Biomedical scientists are such an untapped demographic for Linux use -- these people would gladly migrate to Linux if all the applications they needed were available for Linux. All they care about is power and reliability -- both of which are fulfilled by Linux -- and a smattering of useful scientific applications. Linux has made leaps and bounds for scientists in the fields of physics, math, and engineering, and the next group of scientists it needs to concentrate on are the biologists.

Re:I don't care about Excel, what about OO

[Jody Goldberg]

Frankly I prefer MS Excel's xml to OOo's OASIS xml. We've got parsers for both in Gnumeric, although neither has seen alot of testing. The oasis format irritated my because it felt like it had been designed by the xml people rather than the spreadsheet people. For example, there is no explicit cell addresses in the content. The structure is implicit in the ordering. This means that people can't easily lookup the content of a specific cell without at least a moderate amount of parsing. It also completely ignores share expressions, a huge performance loss.