The StartX Files: Gnumeric 1.0 Proves Stable and Fast

By: Brian Proffitt
Monday, January 7, 2002 12:06:06 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/3989/1/

How Gnumeric Came to Be

When Miguel de Icaza first developed the Gnumeric spreadsheet, it was partly done to implement a new spreadsheet and also to, in his words, "stress test" the new Canvas widget the GNOME development team was trying to integrate into the overall project.

It has been three years and 11 days between the release of Gnumeric 0.4 and Gnumeric 1.0.0. Along the way, this application has grown in stability and popularity as it became intimately associated not only with GNOME, but with Linux itself.

"Going to need a spreadsheet?" my Linux gurus would tell me, "Then you should try Gnumeric."

Over and over this recommendation would come to me, and many times I would heed it. There would be times, of course, when I would try something new, for professional or personal sake. Calc held me for a long time, since it was familiar to me. But I always came back to Gnumeric.

In truth, Gnumeric was the first desktop application I ever used in Linux that gave me a clear sign that not all good apps have to be on a Windows platform. In my formative years on Linux, it was the one thing I could point to and say "see? Excel is not the be-all end-all. Nor is Lotus."

Yes, there were problems. Early on, stability was a huge issue. If you weren't careful, Gnumeric would just up and die for no apparent reason other than you breathed on the keyboard wrong.

But Gnumeric has always had a high priority in the GNOME Project, and bugs reported were bugs that were fixed -- and stayed fixed.

The development history of Gnumeric has been pretty steady over the last three years, until this past December, when the 0.99 releases were announced. It was time, it seemed, to discontinue the .xx releases and move Gnumeric to a new level.

But is Gnumeric 1.0.0 just a window-dressing version label? Or has the Gnumeric development team, led by Jody Goldberg, managed to bring us something the deserves the moniker "major release"?

Getting Gnumeric

Acquiring Gnumeric 1.0.0 for yourself to try is not hard at all. The tarballs for the source code are easily downloaded from the GNOME FTP site If you are up-to-date with all of your GNOME libraries, then feel free. But if you are a bit behind with GNOME updates (as I seemed to be), then I strongly recommend you read the Gnumeric download documentation and make sure you have up-to-date copies of all of the requisite files and libraries. Also, if you don't have the latest copy, go download Guppi. You'll need it, as I'll explain in a moment.

For those of you that prefer not to compile, you can try picking up a packaged version to install. RPMFind is already pointing to a couple of complete packages for Gnumeric, which were created just two days after the initial release of the Gnumeric 1.0.0 source code on Dec. 31. These packages are geared for MandrakeLinux and ASP Linux thus far, but keep checking back.

Installation via the source code method is pretty simple. After finding out I needed the very latest version of libole2 (0.2.4+) and installing that, I was able to perform the usual "gunzip", "tar xvf", "configure", "make", and "make install" method with no significant problems. Getting libole2 successfully installed on my MandrakeLinux 8.1 machine was actually the most difficult part of the process, but that is another story. One piece of advice I got from Jody Goldberg: install libole2 from source if you can.

Later, I was reminded by another esteemed colleague that GNOME projects are usually very helpful with the inclusion of a Spec file in the tarball and that I could have easily gotten the same results from "rpm -tb ./gnumeric-1.0.0.tar.gz." Gnumeric is no exception, either, so use this shortcut if you prefer.

Installation and testing was done on a Pentium II 350 MHz machine that is currently running MandrakeLinux 8.1. GNOME 1.4 was the primary testing environment, though I did try it out in KDE 2.2 just to see what would happen in a cross-environment situation.

Looking at Gnumeric

When you start Gnumeric up, the first thing you are going to notice is speed, and lots of it. Say what you will about Calc, but that it one darn slow application to start up. This is definitely not the case with Gnumeric, which practically leaps onto the screen.

Gnumeric's interface is not particularly cluttered with a lot of toolbars and the attendant buttons, which is good. There is such a thing as too many buttons and gimcracks. This application is clearly made for a no-frills kind of user.

The interfaces for Gnumeric are all standard stuff, with nothing that will throw a user a curve. Cells, rows, and columns are all easily configured with their respective pop-up menus. Cell formatting was robust, and I was easily able to make some sharp-looking spreadsheets.

The function library was very well-stocked, with 300+ functions made available. Manual and cursor-entered creation of formulas is allowed, a standard feature in most spreadsheet applications.

Not so standard in similar applications was the presence of some nifty little tools that lend some real power to Gnumeric, such as the goal-seeking tool that allows you to calculate break-even points on loans and revenue models. It took me a couple of false starts to get this modeling tool running right (mostly because I was confused on the problem setup in my own head) but once the lightbulb went on, it all worked well.

Also included in Gnumeric are 18 very sophisticated data modeling tools, including analysis of variance (ANOVA), histogram, and exponential smoothing -- just to name a few. All of these tools used straightforward dialog boxes to allow you to configure the models as you want. I found the execution of all of these tools to be flawless and only my limited knowledge of statistics probably kept me from enjoying them more.

The only glitch I had running this application, and it was easily fixed, was that fact that you need to have GNOME's Guppi installed if you want to use the graphing tool. Once installed, it all worked like a charm, but I would hope that this is installed by default in later packages.

I have lots of positive things to say about Gnumeric. As a stand-alone application, it is an excellent program. It's not afraid of a lot of data, either. Each sheet holds 65,536 rows and 256 columns of data, which makes for 16,777,216 cells of data to manage. I created some workbooks with all of these cells full of data and there were no stability problems at all.

If you want to use Gnumeric for file sharing, Gnumeric also offers a nice array of XML, HTML, text, and even Excel import and export filters. Curiously, the Excel formats are listed as Excel 95 on the Import and Save functions, but Gnumeric was easily able read Excel 2000 formatted workbooks. Gnumeric read my Excel files flawlessly and without a noticeable dip in speed.

And that's something I kept coming back to in this application. No matter what I threw at it, whether over-formatted Excel files or huge workbooks full of data, Gnumeric never faltered or slowed. It's stability and speed in GNOME was excellent. It even clipped right along in KDE, too.

At the very least, this spreadsheet application is equal to Calc or Excel in terms of tool-sets and data management. But, frankly, I think it's better, in that this is one very fast app to run. The Gnumeric team is to be highly commended for their work on this program, because the quality really shows.

Gnumeric makes a very fine addition to GNOME Office. Indeed, based on what I've seen thus far, it is currently the crown jewel in that suite of applications. It is certainly worth a new look if you have been away from it for a while.

Available from: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnu meric/
Version reviewed: Gnumeric 1.0.0-1
License: GPL
Cost: Free