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Gnumeric 1.4 is Here!

Gnumeric
Gnumeric

The Internet, December 19, 2004 -- for immediate release.

The Gnumeric Team is pleased to announce the availability of Gnumeric version 1.4.1. This is the first publicly announced version of the new stable 1.4 series, part of GNOME Office 1.2.

We have worked hard at producing the best available spreadsheet for a wide range of applications from simple numerical scratch pad, financial analytical tool, to scientific number cruncher.

More than a year has passed since the release of the 1.2 series and many things have been improved:

Improved Microsoft Exceltm compatibility:
Charts and images can now be exported, and objects (even Forms) are handled more smoothly. There is full support for all types of 'array' formulas and operators.

Better Charting:
Several new types of charts have been added, and many features, such as error bars, and non-linear plots, have been added.

Improved accuracy:
While Gnumeric 1.2 was already the best available source for accuracy in statistical calculations, Gnumeric 1.4 is even better. We are cooperating with The R Project to make this happen.

Win32 and small device portability:
It is now possible to run Gnumeric on Microsoft Windows. The port is not quite production ready, but is maturing rapidly. With a small loss of functionality Gnumeric can also build with only the Gtk+ library stack dropping the remainder of the GNOME library set for small devices.

Network transparency:
Gnumeric can now access spreadsheets stored on web servers directly.

Even more sheet functions:
We have added even more sheet functions to Gnumeric, for example a set of functions for telecommunications engineering. Gnumeric now has 470 sheet functions including all sheet functions in the North American version of Microsoft Exceltm XP, and more than 100 beyond that.

Rich and Rotated Text:
Multiple formats and fonts within strings, and in 1.4.2 rotated text is supported too. (This requires recent versions of Pango and the Gnome Print libraries.)

Improved printing:
Printing has been improved and is now using the same layout mechanism as on-screen. This should greatly reduce printing surprises. (This requires recent versions of Pango and the Gnome Print libraries.)

GTK+ 2.4/2.6 integration:
Gnumeric takes advantage of, for example, GTK+'s highly improved file selector.

Getting Gnumeric

Gnumeric 1.4 is available
from the redesigned and updated Gnumeric home Page.

Looking Ahead
The 1.4 series is not the end of the line. You can see some of our future plans at our to-do list and our list of frequently asked questions contains the answers to common questions about features.

Thanks
The 1.4 release is dedicated to the memory of lost colleagues, Chema (Grandma) Celorio who helped make Gnumeric as stable as it is, and Mel Seder who kept us smiling. They'll both be missed.

Team Gnumeric
 

Jody: Maintainer
Morten W: All round powerhouse
Andreas Guelzow: Stats and so much more
Adrian Custer: Docs
Emmanuel Pacaud: Widgets and charts
Hal Ashburner: More option pricers
Ivan Wong: win32 builds
J.H.M. Dassen (Ray): 1.2 series maintainer
Jean Brefort: Charts
Jon K Hellan: Widget wizard
Joseph Pingenot: New website
Stepan Kasal: OLE2 export audit and non-gtk
development

Gnumeric relies heavily on other projects: the Perl Compatible Regular Expression engine, The R Project, the GNU Linear Programming Kit, the lp_solve mixed integer programming solver, and of course GNOME.

Thanks are owed to the many people who have contributed patches during Gnumeric's development. Especially for the translators who wade through the tremendous volume of text in Gnumeric and deserve a lot of credit for dealing with the abstruse terms and jargon:
Abel Cheung,
Adam Weinberger,
Alessio Frusciante,
Alexander Shopov,
Alastair McKinstry,
Andras Timar,
Andrew Makhorin,
Arief Mulya Utama,
Artur Flinta,
Asbullah Bin Pit,
Carlos Perell?? Mar??n,
Changwoo Ryu,
Christian Neumair,
Christophe Fergeau,
Christophe Merlet,
Christopher James Lahey,
Daniel Yacob,
Danilo Segan ,
David Lodge,
David Mosberger-Tang,
Dom Lachowicz,
Duarte Loreto,
Etsushi Kato,
Evandro Fernandes Giovanini,
Fatih Demir,
Francisco Javier F. Serrador,
Fr??d??ric Parrenin Funda Wang,
German Poo-Caama??o,
Gil "Dolfin" Osher,
Guntupalli Karunakar,
Gustavo Maciel Dias Vieira,
Gustavo Noronha Silva,
Jan Mor??n,
John Gill Jordi Mallach,
Jukka Pekka,
Kjartan Maraas,
Kostas Papadimas,
Metin Amiroff,
Miloslav Trmac,
Nick Lamb,
Nikos Charonitakis,
Pablo Gonzalo del Campo,
Pablo Saratxaga,
Priit Laes,
Raphael Higino,
Robert Sedak,
Rodrigo Moya,
Stanislav Visnovsky,
Stepan Kasal,
Takeshi AIHANA,
Tomasz Koczko,
Tommi Vainikainen,
Valek Filippov,
Vincent van Adrighem,
Wang Jian,
Yukihiro Nakai

-MW

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HOLY SHIT

WOW, this is even beter than Excel, and it is flawless in saving and opening Excel files! Why is OO pushed so much, this is by far better than OO Spreadsheet and it is multiplatform!

THANK YOU GNUMERIC DEVELOPERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks, keep up the good work!

Last week I ran into trouble with OOo calc, trying to import and plot a large text file of data. It was so slow, impossible to work with, and I was using a fast machine.

I then tried Gnumeric and found it worked much better. Thanks!

Two weeks ago I ran into a problem trying to do a histogram type function in calc, does gnumeric have such a function?

Histograms

Look under Tools->Statistical Analysis.

Gnumeric vs OO

Which one is better?

re: Gnumeric vs OO

Gnumeric has a much better implementation of many functions compared to OO. Some functions simply don't work in OO for certain input data because of bad implementation. The POISSON() function is a good example. For big input values this function doesn't work in OO.

Gnumeric by a mile. Does e

Gnumeric by a mile.

Does everything I need. Import excel files better.

OOo calc is soooo slow and sucky.

Backup?

OOo calc is soooo slow and sucky.

Slow, ok sure. It would be nice if you provided some context (it's always been perfectly snappy for me on my meagre 800 MHz box, but then again my needs are simple enough). What about "sucky"? What makes OOo calc so "sucky"?

I have a 450 Mhz celeron at h

I have a 450 Mhz celeron at home. OOo (even calc) takes 1 minute to load.

Gnumeric takes 8 seconds to load on that machine.

My wife has to edit MS Excel spreadhseets for her micro biz. OOo always gets things a bit wrong, renders funny, doesn't propagate functions into the corrct cells, gets the backgrounds wrong.

Then it makes weird glitches during the editting.
First she swears at the machine for being so slow to load OOo, then she calls me in to fix OOo's f*ckups.

On the other hand Gnumeric simply *just works*. Not glitches, no mis-rendering, no issues with functions not propagrating into cells.

OOo is sucky, Gnumeric works.

Excel vs Gnumeric

How do these compare?

Gnumeric wins.

I'll bite. Gnumeric takes the prize for me. Most importantly, I get software freedom with Gnumeric. No such luck with Excel. On technical grounds, the choice is obvious after real-world testing: Gnumeric gets me past silly limits I would have experienced under Excel. Excel has inexplicably mangled spreadsheets (which, in a way, reminds me of Microsoft Word which doesn't like large documents either). I remember when Office 97 didn't load documents made with previous versions of Microsoft programs (now distributed as Microsoft Office); Office 97 was said to be upwardly compatible. I don't have time for upgrades that kill my ability to read old documents, so I pick free software.

Gnumeric wins, but

I agree.

I use Gnumeric on a daily basis at work and it is an excellent program, but. Yes unfortunatly there is a but. My worksheets tend to be big and with big I mean around 35000 lines. Gnumeric runs fine with these big sets, also formulas on all rows is not a problem. The problem is sorting a large sheet with formulas, even a simple concatenate brings the sort to its knees taking over 5 minutes to complete the process (3.4GHz). Similar sheets in Excel sort in mere seconds or less. Sorting with a vlookup function is worse and therefor barely useable.

Re: Slow sorting...

It would be useful if you could test the patch over at bug 161909.

Re: Slow sorting...

Wow.

That makes a big difference. I tried a simple (Excel) sheet and sorting is reduced from 2 minutes to a couple of seconds. I saved it as a gnumeric file to compare it to 1.4.1 and it seemed that the CVS version I compiled used a lot less memory:

984m 967m 21m S 0.0 47.7 2:06.29 gnumeric-1.4.1
313m 178m 21m S 0.0 8.8 1:01.95 gnumeric-1.4.2

Unfortunately closing 1.4.2 and reloading the (gnumeric) document saved from 1.4.2 resulted in.
978m 968m 20m S 0.0 47.8 0:21.88 gnumeric-1.4.2

This is a 19K rows, 81 cols file, and that is a lot of memory!

Oh well, memory consumption I can live with, if the sorting patch is incorporated I will be happy!

Slow sorting...

The developpers probably neglected using the quicksort algorithm. :(

Re: Slow sorting...

Bah. Gnumeric does use quicksort. From that you learn that quicksort is only of (average) time complexity O(n*log n) under certain assumptions, such as constant-time swapping of elements. We clearly do not have that due to dependency tracking.

That's not to say that we cannot make it a few hundred times faster. We will, when we get around to it.

File a bug in Bugzilla

I'm not one of the developers, but could you please file a bug about the slow sorting in Bugzilla (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/). Attaching an (compressed) example sheet would really help.

WTF! No screenshots?

*gasp*
A release witout screenshots? The horror! Christmas is ruined!

Seriously though, a nice piece of work. I use gnumeric almost everyday of the year. Also, I'm not that big a fan of christmas... ;)

Screenshots...

Well, you could have gone all the way to the Gnumeric home page and seen a few:

Annoucement a bit delayed...

I've been using 1.4 for a bit now :-)) what happened with this release? it seems that the announcements were a bit un-coordinated... and the gnumeric ML didn't seem to give much information either... anyways, its a brilliant release. the graphing is well cool. found a few minor issues but all & all its a great piece of software. what's the status of gnumeric on win32, does anyone know?

cheers

marco

Re: Annoucement a bit delayed...

Just a case of "real life" intruding on plans.

win32 status

I couldn't install it correctly. I believe the gnumeric gtk installer was conflicting with the gimp gtk installer. That's the status of gnumeric on my machine.

i will learn to read release notes... :-)

obviously the release notes talk about the status of the win32 port.
reading is obviously a difficult skill... :-))

marco