Re: gnumeric or oocalc
On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 15:41:16 +0000, Kamaraju Kusumanchi wrote:
> My intention is not to start a flamewar but to get opinions on
> which spreadsheet software is better?
As the maintainer of the Debian packages for gnumeric, I'm not the most
objective source of information. Still, you may find these remarks useful.
> While having choice is better, I would prefer to start with one and stick
> to it if possible. In particular I am looking for
>
> 1) things which can be done in one but cant be done in another?
AFAIK Gnumeric has more extensive support for specialised areas like
statistical analysis and financial analysis.
Gnumeric can import encrypted Excel sheets; oocalc can't AFAIK.
Oocalc has spellcheck functionality; Gnumeric doesn't.
> 2) Which is better compatible with microsoft excel?
Excel compatibility is very important for Gnumeric, and it receives plenty
of attention. Examples include the conservation of Excel macros when loading
and saving in Gnumeric and the development of a separate library, libgsf,
for handling "structured files", including MS OLE. libgsf is now being used
by other applications like Abiword and Kword.
> 3) which requires more memory, speed, other performance aspects?
OpenOffice appears to be much more resource hungry than Gnumeric, at least
for a simple test case. I have a simple sheet with some tax related data in
it. Running gnumeric on it results in 5 threads, consuming approximately
19MB; running oocalc on it results in 6 threads, consuming approximately
56MB.
As for accuracy, http://www.csdassn.org/software_reports/gnumeric.pdf should
inspire some confidence as to gnumeric's developers' careful attention to
accuracy.
Occasionally I get the impression that in OpenOffice, attention is typically
focused on getting things to work well for "normal" cases, and that corners
are often cut when it comes to "special" cases.
> 4) which is being actively developed and has good documentation?
OpenOffice is backed by major commercial players like Sun and Novell;
undoubtedly it is under active development. I'm not familiar with its
documentation.
Gnumeric is being actively developed (see e.g.
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnumeric/ChangeLog?sortby=date&view=markup); it
currently includes some 4.6MB of English language documentation in DocBook
XML format.
> 5) Any better spreadsheet programs out there which I have not looked at?
Not that I'm aware of, at least not free software ones. Kcalc, sc, Oleo etc.
are much more limited than oocalc and gnumeric.
> 6) Enable some sort of scripting along with gui?
There is quite a bit of infrastructure in place in Gnumeric to prepare for
scripting (in particular using Python), but it is not yet at a point where
it is easily usable for end users.
HTH,
Ray
--
sendmail.cf does not resemble line noise. It resembles the result of
somebody banging his head on the keyboard. Anybody who has worked with it
will understand why.
Seth Breidbart in <8db6uj$67j$1@panix2.panix.com>
Reply to: