The StartX Files: Between the Sheets Roundup

By: Brian Proffitt
Friday, March 1, 2002 05:34:37 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/4078/1/

The Desktop Application Balancing Act

Looking at desktop applications for Linux these days has become a bit of a balancing act; on the one hand, there is the obligation to review all of the features objectively. One the other, it has become clear that it is necessary to examine how desktop applications will fit into the corporate environment. While we cannot ignore the home users, there is growing evidence that this will not be the arena where Linux will grow on the desktop.

It will be the corporate desktop where such evolutions will occur, and maybe not as quickly as some in the Linux community would hope. There is a strong and growing movement to insert Linux in the organization in the server arena as many CIOs and IT managers are beginning to understand what Linux users have known for quite some time: that on the back-end, Linux is a dominant force for server processes.

Ultimately, it will be this server adoption that will lend some effort to the adoption of Linux on the desktop, as admins impressed with Linux's performance on the servers will begin to wonder how they can get that performance to their client machines.

If there is to be a successful migration to the desktop on Linux, this is my scenario of how it will happen.

This series of reviews on spreadsheets for Linux is evidence that in more and more critical business areas, Linux apps are becoming very ready for that desktop.

All they need is a better look.

abs and StarCalc

abs 0.907

Available from: http://www.ping.be/bertin/abs.shtml
Version reviewed: 0.907 for Linux/Intel
Version currently available: 0.908 for Linux/Intel (Source Only)
License: GNU General Public License
Cost: Free

The first thing you will say to yourself after starting abs is "Oh. Motif." since that is what the interface appears to be built upon. Actually, its based on Xaw, which has a very Motif-like look. This was certainly intentional, since Bertin first developed abs in Motif for AIX back in 1996.

Although Xaw/Motif are aesthetically not my favorite widget kits, the overall look of abs was satisfactory. I did notice that there were some mouse tracking delays within the dialog boxes under KDE, which did not happen under GNOME. These delays were slightly more than negligible, so for better performance I would recommend working with this under GNOME, if you are inclined to use a desktop environment.

In terms of functionality, all of the standard spreadsheet accouterments were in place: input line, function bar, row and column controls... pretty much everything you need to manipulate your data in the cells and sheets. The only thing missing that I would have liked to have seen was a pop-up context menu for the row and column control buttons. In abs, you have to select the row or column then go all the way up to the main menus to implement a command like formatting. Picky, but time-consuming after a while.

Printing is not a difficult thing to master, as abs workbooks are converted to XFig format and then sent to the printer in that format. You need to make sure you have fig2dev if you want to send information to the printer in PostScript format.

abs does a good job letting you enter functions into individual cells without having to type a thing, if you are willing. Just click on the Function tool, pick a function, and then choose the cells you want to be entered in the function to have their cell addresses automatically entered. The only thing you need enter manually are parentheses and brackets, if you need them. There are 144 functions included, so there's no shortage of calculations to implement.

Chart creation is a wee bit convoluted, depending on how you start it. If you have a range of cells selected, then selecting Chart|Create will immediately slap up an XY chart, which can be moved and resized around the sheet with ease. Of course, this is all well and good unless you wanted another kind of chart. In this case, or if you don't have a range selected, you will have to use the Chart|Create menu commands and then Chart|Change Chart to pick a range and/or chart type. You can select from XY, pie, and bar charts, using a dialog box that is very reminiscent of Excel's chart tool. Again, this quirk is not a deal-breaker, just a little quirk that you will have to adapt to.

Speaking of Excel, abs does provide a certain kind of compatibility with Excel, using a unique tool patterned directly after Visual Basic: the ABVisual scripting language.

Bertin's approach to sharing Excel and abs files is rather interesting. The contents of every abs file, he explained, is an ABVisual script that is faithfully recreated by abs when the spreadsheet file is opened in abs.

"If you open in an editor the file saved by abs," Bertin said, "you will find something like:

Sub main() Cells(1,1).formula = "Welcome to the abs 
spreadsheet" Cells(2,1)Formula = "=10+10" Cells(2,1).font.size 
= 18 ... End sub

"When you open this file inside abs," he continued, "abs will execute the macro called main to recreate the spreadsheet. Inside Excel, you just have to import the file inside Visual Basic, run the main routine and the result is exactly the same."

To reverse the process and pull Excel data into abs, Bertin has written a simple Excel macro to save the content of the workbook in the abs file/script format.

Granted, this is a bit cumbersome, but it works. I was able to open files of either type with impunity in either application. Some of the fancier formatted Excel workbooks looked a bit weird in abs, but this was mostly due to font-handling differences between Windows and X.

As far as other spreadsheet formats are concerned, users might be a bit out of luck for now, as Bertin has concentrated his efforts on just Excel compatibility for now.

The ABVisual scripting language is one of the big strengths of abs, since it does far more than provide Excel compatibility. According to Bertin, "[ABVisual scripts] can be compiled as stand-alone applications and you can easily add your own classes to the object model."

Calc, StarOffice 6.0 Beta

Available from: http://www.sun.com/staroffice/
Version reviewed: StarOffice 6.0 Beta, Calc component
Version currently available: StarOffice 5.2, Calc component (Beta program ended Dec. 31, 2001)
License: Proprietary
Cost: Free

StarOffice 6.0 beta is based directly on OpenOffice and there hasn't been very much documented diversion between the two components' development paths. The only thing I could find in the release notes was the OpenOffice Calc now has the Launch() function working in version 641b. Presumably, this is different from the StarOffice version, which mirrors a slightly earlier version of OpenOffice.

There are, naturally, other undocumented differences. The fonts on the StarOffice Calc components (menus, title bars, dialog boxes) are non-aliased, no matter what you do with the spadmin tool. Curiously, font handling within StarOffice Calc looks a smidge better than within OpenOffice. But that kerning problem I harped on last week is still readily apparent.

Feature for feature, Calc in StarOffice is identical to Calc in OpenOffice, as you would expect at this early point in their digression. SO Calc is faster to get started: 15 seconds vs. OO Calc's 23 seconds on initial startup, and 6 seconds for SO Calc vs. 9 seconds for OO Calc on subsequent starts. I could not see an appreciable difference in the speeds of the two applications once they were running.

So what do you get with StarOffice's version that you might not get with its OpenOffice counterpart? For now, Calc in StarOffice has a little more polished performance. Once things get settled in the final version of StarOffice 6.0, I expect this to be even more readily apparent. Whether this will be a long-term trend remains to be seen, since one would expect OpenOffice to pull away from StarOffice since the latter will presumably be locked into a more rigid release schedule than the former. Of course, this is just a guess on my part: these two products may leapfrog each other on major releases in perpetuity for all I know.

If you want to get a hold of Calc for StarOffice 6.0, will need to wait for a bit. The beta program ended on the last day of 2001 and there is no specific word on the exact date of release for StarOffice 6.0, though Sun is expecting it to ship in early 2002.

gnumeric and HancomSheet

Gnumeric 1.0.0-1

Available from: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/
Version reviewed: Gnumeric 1.0.0-1
Version currently available: Gnumeric 1.0.4
License: GPL
Cost: Free

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 be 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 toolsets and data management. But, frankly, I think it's better, in that this is one very fast app to run. All of the Gnumeric Project 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.

HancomSheet 2.0

Available from: http://www.hancom.com/
Version reviewed/available: HancomSheet for Linux 2.0
License: Proprietary
Cost: $24.95 US (for HancomOffice 2.0)

While HancomSheet was very quick in the KDE environment (nearly as fast as Gnumeric in GNOME), speed is not enough to save this application from being rather mediocre. I was surprised at this, given the successful efforts HancomLinux has put into the other applications in the HancomOffice suite.

One glaring problem was the way HancomSheet has you enter functions. In other apps, some sort of drop-down list in the toolbar is typically used to insert a function into a cell. Then, you can usually click on individual cells or a range of cells to enter the values into the function. In HancomSheet, you have no such luxury. Instead, you have to step through a Function Wizard to accomplish function entry. You can type functions in manually and then use the mouse to click on cells for value entry, but you have to make sure you have your cursor in between the parentheses of the function in the input line and be pressing Ctrl while you click on the cells. The whole thing felt really cumbersome for me.

I found that many of the heavy-hitter tools, such as data analysis, charts, and a killer pivot table-like tool called ezTable did very well in terms of ease of use and speed. The charts were especially robust and easy to configure.

But there were only 183 functions included with HancomSheet, and each sheet only contained 16,384 rows and 512 columns. This last figure means that there are only 8,288,608 cells for an HancomSheet sheet, putting it at the lower end of the other apps' cell counts in this review.

In the interoperability arena, HancomSheet can only open Excel files. Granted, it accomplished this fairly well, but there are a lot of other apps out there Linux users could share files with besides Excel. While other spreadsheets in this review can't even accomplish this, I though the lack of filters odd for an office suite that is positioning itself for the corporate user.

Stability was not a problem for large files with lots of calculations, but there were two separate segfault incidents when I was entering function values with the mouse.

Over and over, I found examples of how HancomSheet seemed to be loaded with lots of fancy goodies, but a lack of attention was paid to the basics of the app itself.

KSpread and NExS

Looking at KSpread

Available from: http://www.koffice.org/kspread/
Version reviewed/available: KSpread 1.1.1
License: GPL
Cost: Free

First and foremost, KSpread is not a quick application to run. Opening up even modest sized files was slow, even when the application was already up and running. This is my biggest beef with KSpread, because even native format files just did not open with a lot of pep. Lack of speed was less than a factor when the application was performing operations, but the opening and saving sluggardness really threw me.

As far as the interface goes, everything was simple and clean. There is a function drop-down menu if you want it, or you can use a Formula Editor to build your functions. Using the Formula Editor gave you the distinct advantage of receiving an explanation of what each function was and also brought up ways to further modify the function at hand. (I could enter floating point values directly in the Formula Editor for the SUM function, for example.)

KSpread did rank high in terms of individual sheet size with 676 columns and 32767 rows producing a potential of over 22.1 million cells. It also did well in the formatting category, since the tools are easy to find.

Interoperability was well covered, as import filters are available for Applix Sheet, Excel, Gnumeric, and Quattro Pro. Files can be saved out to HTML, text, Gnumeric, and (of course) KSpread's own native format. I tried a number of different formats conversions and everything always came through fine--provided there was an equivalent function available in KSpread.

It was here that I found another big concern: one of my Excel test file's cells blanked out upon opening in KSpread. I checked, and the cell originally had a PRODUCT function, which is not available in KSpread. This struck me as really strange, until I discovered that KSpread only includes 140 functions in its toolchest--the lowest amount I have seen to date.

Now, things like the PRODUCT or DIV functions can easily be replaced with arithmetic operators, but with other spreadsheets coming in at plus-200 and even plus-300 available functions, this is a huge gap.

On the other hand, looking at the chart tools led me to find a more pleasant discovery. Charting is done modularly with the KChart tool, which integrated seamlessly into the KDE interface. The fact that charting was included by default with KSpread gives it a leg up on Gnumeric, where you have to perform some extra steps to get it installed. The variety of charts and the ease of configuration was not as good as Calc or HancomSheet, but it was enough to get by.

But as good as KSpread works with KChart to embed chart objects, KSpread really shined where any embedded objects were used. Embedding word processor files from KWord and slides from KPresenter was a snap and the objects were easily positioned and manipulated. KSpread, it seems, really does well at playing with others.

What struck me about this spreadsheet application was that I was not sure what audience it was being targeted for. With only a handful functions included and almost no data management tools, I cannot imagine this spreadsheet as being useful for anyone but the home user who just needs to pull some data together and maybe run a chart or two.

KSpread really belongs within KOffice, because the interoperability of it and the other KOffice applications is something that really makes this application better as a team player than a stand-alone spreadsheet. The ability to embed objects fairly indiscriminately between the KOffice applications is a real plus.

If the KSpread developers, who have done a good job coming this far, could work on the speed issue and then just load up KSpread with as many functions as they could squeeze into the toolkit, then I think KSpread would become a serious contender in the business environment.

NExS Personal Edition 1.4.6

Available from: http://www.greytrout.com/
Version reviewed/available: NExS Personal Edition 1.4.6
License: Proprietary
Cost: $49 US

If I were to look at NExS from a strictly spreadsheet point of view, I would probably wave you off and urge you to try other application. There simply is not a lot here to recommend.But there is a lot more functionality associated with NExS, enough to give it a unique place among Linux spreadsheet programs.

Starting with the basics, the NExS interface is put together by Motif, and it is very simple. Almost too simple. Right away, you are going to notice a lack of multi-sheet capability, something which every other Linux spreadsheet application provides. Basic formatting tools, also present in the other apps in this series of reviews, are also not present or very rudimentary. The formatting tools that were in NExS were really hard to find, buried in the Options menu.

The available cell count on NExS sheets is well-sized: with 32767 rows by 4096 columns, the 134.2 million cells is the leader for individual data sheet size for this series.

The amount of included functions is not skimpy either: by my count, there are 232 functions you can use in NExS. Though not the overall leader, it's still in the middle of the pack for function availability. Availability, though, is a bit of a misnomer. There is no automated formula builder or function list to use in NExS. So formula creation has to be done manually and by remembering function names and syntax from the provided help documentation.

Interoperability is okay, though nothing very exciting. You can import delimited text files and directly open Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel spreadsheet files. You can also save to these binary formats and export to text, HTML, and LaTeX formats. Running my standard cross-format tests, I found that formulas and values came across fine, but no formatting at all was present--everything just reverted to the standard format for NExS.

Is NExS really the right application for the average corporate user? Absolutely not. If it was trying to market to this audience, I would be pulling out all sorts of epithets to hurl at it and its makers at GreyTrout. But that is clearly not what NeXS is to be used for. It is aimed straight at the programmers who want a stable spreadsheet platform in Linux through which they can channel data in neatly packaged ways.

Sure, we've seen scripting before in the other spreadsheet applications in this series. OpenOffice, HancomOffice... most of the apps I've looked at have some sort of scripting functionality. I have avoided discussing these features because I have been trying to gear my reviews for people who may not be power users that try to write scripts.

NExS, however, has forced me to grind this policy to a complete halt. That's because the only users who are going to get any real benefit from NExS are the power users and the programmers. Anyone else who tries NExS will run into a huge wall that--without programming skills--is insurmountable.

If the online documentation is correct, then I have the sense that the potential of NExS is very good. The ability to pull in and manipulate data from any source application would be a very powerful tool indeed. In short, NExS would be a chameleon, able to be used with almost any data to deliver data to corporate users quickly and succinctly.

As just a spreadsheet, NExS is not something I would recommend. But if the API functions as well as GreyTrout claims, then this is definitely a tool corporate programmers might want to take a look at.

Quattro Pro and Siag

Quattro Pro 9

Available from: Various sources
Version reviewed: Quattro Pro 9 for Linux
License: Proprietary
Cost: Varies

If you can get a hold of WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, then you will have a working copy of Quattro Pro 9.

When Corel decided to bump up their entire office suite to the Linux platform, they sort of cheated by migrating everything over to a WINE port. They did this even with WordPerfect itself, to maintain consistency. Right away, this might raise suspicion, since WINE-based apps are notoriously unstable.

Such is not the case with Quattro Pro 9. I had no trouble running it during the tests for this review. But one thing was clear very quickly: this is not a speedster's application. Quattro Pro is slow. It was slow when I used to run it on Corel Linux 2.0 and it was slow when I ran it on Mandrake 8.1.

Quattro Pro is one of the oldest spreadsheet applications around, with a venerable history that goes almost all the way back to VisCalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Its experience seems to have served it well, because during its lifespan, Quattro Pro has picked up 525 functions in its formula library.

Formula creation was simple to do with the Formula Composer, if pointing and clicking is your cup of tea.

The data manipulation tools were top-notch, particularly the Cross Tab Reports, which are Quattro Pro's version of the pivot table. The Cross Tab Reports were easy to use, a descriptor not always associated with pivot tables.

Formatting tools were good, but Quattro Pro 9 did show its age in displaying aliased fonts both on screen and from the printer, even in KDE. The well-stocked array of charting tools, though, almost made up for this blemish. Quattro Pro's charts can be set up and looking good in a snap.

Interoperability with Quattro Pro is pretty decent, too. Besides its own file format, Quattro Pro can open Excel files (up to 97), Lotus 1-2-3 (up to v. 5), HTML, text-delimited files, and (if you actually have some lying about) Quicken (QIF) format files.

Quattro Pro can also save to these formats as well, but only the contents of the current sheet will be saved. So, multi-sheet documents are a pain to save to other formats.

In terms of spreadsheet stats, try 1,000,000 rows by 18,000 columns. This gives a spreadsheet size with a total of 18 billion cells (which is even more staggering if you consider that each Quattro Pro workbook will handle 18,000 individual worksheets).

There are some elements that can be improved, of course. The speed issue, for one, the fonts for another. I leave these thoughts as a record of posterity, in case someone ever does get the licensing from Corel and decides to pick up where Corel left its Linux users high and dry.

I hope someone does, someday. Quattro Pro was one of the best in its day, and it deserves another chance on the Linux platform.

Siag 3.5.0-2

Available from: http://siag.nu/index.html
Version reviewed/available: Siag 3.5.0-2
License: GPL
Cost: Free

Siag is another one of those applications, like NeXS, that lets you customize and manipulate data using more programming than spreadsheet functionality. To cut to the chase, how Siag works is this: you have a spreadsheet application that can use programming expressions (as opposed to scripts) to set up almost any function in a spreadsheet document that you would want.

When I review an application, I have a little "first impressions" session to get a feel for what this application will be like. In Siag's first session, I thought I had found a real clunker. Where were the functions? Why was text entry in cells so hard?

And that's where first impressions can be very misleading. After checking out the documentation, I found out I was way off-base with Siag. I found about about Scheme, and all of the ways you can use C-like expressions to build upon the 300+ function library to build something as simplistic as a custom function... or an applet as complex as a Web server (something that is included as an example with Siag).

From a user standpoint, there is not a lot to get excited about. The Xt-widget interface is simple and to the point, but cell entry is cumbersome since you have hit the Enter key every time. Formatting tools were not very sophisticated, either.

Interoperatbilty is a bit better: besides its own file format, Siag can open Lotus 1-2-3, LaTeX, HTML, or direct Scheme code. It can save out to all of these save Scheme, though it can save also save to Troff and PDF files (though I suspect you need something more to accomplish this last task; when I tried it it did not work).

From this perspective, Siag is not up to desktop standards. But with the Scheme functionality, it's better to think of Siag as a very good shell, into which a skilled programmer can pour in some very creative stuff and get some really unique output, custom made for their business.

So, slip this is in your "Check this Out" file, programmers, and see if Siag is something that can help you.

AnyWare Office

Spreadsheets, Anyware Office

Available from: http://www.vistasource.com
Version reviewed/available: Spreadsheets, Anyware Office 2.2
License: Proprietary
Cost: $99 US (for suite and application server)

As spreadsheet applications go, Spreadsheets is a pretty good all-around sort of tool. The interface, based on GTK+, is well put-together and easy to understand and use. Things weren't overly buried in the menus, either.

In the basic statistics, Spreadsheets holds the middle of the field of spreadsheets reviewed thus far: each sheet can handle 702 columns and 32,767 rows, giving a total of 23,002,434 cells per sheet. Anyware's documentation claims more than 300 functions, but I could only find 268 in the version I reviewed--still, a fair amount.

There are a lot of convenience features within Spreadsheets that are reminiscent of Excel and Lotus 1-2-3: Autofill, AutoFormat, pre-made templates, and an HTML wizard, just for starters. One feature that is really unique to Spreadsheets is the real-time data engine, which will allow you to create real-time, self-updating data sheets that can give you up-to-the-second information, if that's what you need. I did not delve too far into creating such a sheet, but the online demo of the function was very impressive.

Calculations are not as quick as some of the other spreadsheets I have reviewed to date; there always seemed to be a pause before cells would fill in with the right values. It wasn't bad, but for some of the larger cell operations, it was pretty noticeable.

The stability of the desktop version of the application seemed pretty good, but in my attempt to Autofill all of the cells with random numbers, the application locked up my entire KDE desktop. And I mean everything--I could not even Ctrl-Alt-Backspace my way out of the problem, which made this my first official system freeze of 2002. For a brief, cynical moment, I thought that VistaSource's developers had carried this cross-platform thing too far and was now trying to make my Linux system behave like a Windows system. Then I grudgingly hit the power button and fscked my way back to reality.

That may have been a weird fluke, I will admit, because when I tried the test again, it seemed to work, though slowly. So take this event as you will.

But there was one area that consistently failed to work properly: opening non-Spreadsheets documents. According to the interface and documentation, Spreadsheets is supposed to open Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and Symbolic Link formatted files, along with CSV text. I did not test the latter three formats in this list, but when I tried to open my set of test Excel files (which span versions from Excel 97 to Excel XP), the import operation locked up every time. And these were not complicated files, nor were they anything that any of the other Linux spreadsheet applications I had tested thus far that claimed Excel compatibility had any trouble with.

Filters are apparently a long-standing problem with Anyware, and Applixware before it. If I could offer one piece of advice to the VistaSource developers, I would urge them to fix this issues as soon as they could. The thin-client, cross-platform capability is really great, but few organizations will never have to open an Excel file.

On the other hand, Anyware Office also includes a full-fledged application server that uses Java to transport itself to almost any platform. In other words, users can point their browsers to the application server and in about a minute they can have a fully functional, thin-client version of Anyware Office running on their machine. Which takes accessibility to a whole new level. With an Anyware Office application server running in an organization, it no longer matters who's running Linux or who's running Windows. Users can use the thin-client office suite to point to a common set of applications with a common file format. A multi-user filesystem is built into the server as well, so file sharing becomes that much easier across a centralized set of directories.

A big side benefit of this technology is that you can see it in action across the Internet first and get a try-before-you-buy opportunity. The Anyware Office online demo will show you a full-featured set of Anyware Office tools, all seamlessly working through your favorite Web browser. And as near as I could tell, all of the functionality of the desktop-installed version was duplicated in the online version. I concentrated on the abilities of Spreadsheets, naturally, and found that all of the features (and the foibles, too) worked identically on each platform.

If VistaSource can lick its problem with filtering, I think that they have a very strong offering, especially when you consider the $99 price will get you the application server as well as the desktop version of Anyware Office. A cross-platform and cross-format office suite would be an excellent addition to a business environment looking to slowly shift to a more open, less costly environment.

Top of the List: OpenOffice

Available from: http://www.openoffice.org
Version reviewed: OpenOffice 641b, Calc component
Version currently available: OpenOffice 641c, Calc component
License: LGPL, SISSL
Cost: Free

This decision was easy to make on some levels, but not on others. While OpenOffice Calc certainly leads the field in robustness, it was very hard to ignore the leaps recently made by the Gnumeric team. I am a confirmed desktop agnostic, but it was hard not to be impressed with the latest version of the GNOME-based spreadsheet application. In the end, though, I had to come down on what was the best application now. With that criteria, then the award has to go to Calc for OpenOffice.

The version of Calc I reviewed was from OpenOffice 641b, one version back from 641c, which is available now. Newcomers to OpenOffice should be made aware that the application is available not only for x86/Linux, but also PPC/Linux as well. It also is available in Solaris (Intel and Sparc) and even Win32, making it a great candidate for business organizations that have not let go of other platforms.

When they first open Calc, new users have got to impressed by the depth of the toolset provided by this spreadsheet. Most of the rest of us, though, know full well that Calc has an impressive lineage of StarOffice versions behind it, so there's been more than enough time to build a very full-featured application.

This application is full of the little touches that make using Calc a pleasure. Right-click on any cell and you can access a selection list that lets you choose from all the other values in that column.

Importing data is straightforward, too. Just select the data source, which can be an Adabas, JDBC, ODBC, or dBase; or a text-delimited file or spreadsheet. Then pick the tables and/or ranges you want to use, and you're all set.

Formatting within Calc features a whole host of options, from simple cell highlights to degree-by-degree text rotation. Though it won't look good on screen, if you have a printer set up correctly within your environment and with spadmin, the hardcopy results will look pretty good.

If there is one thing lacking in Calc that a user sees a lot of in Excel, it's wizards. But I don't say this like it's a bad thing. For mid-range and experienced users, too often Microsoft-type wizards just slow them down. Such users just want the tool to manipulate their data and get on with life.

If you fall into this particular mindset, then Calc is certainly going to make you happy. Function for function, tool for tool, Calc is easily a match for the prolific Excel. But the implementation of those tools is not as "dumbed-down" as Excel's tools can be, especially in the later versions of Excel, where Microsoft's approach to every problem seems to make treat users as if they're ignorant four-year-olds.

In terms of sheer file compatibility, OpenOffice seems to have stepped back from the old StarOffice approach of throwing in every single filter they could find. Besides the database formats mentioned above, OpenCalc can only open Excel (5.0 - XP) workbooks and StarCalc (3.0 - 5.0) spreadsheets. This is a far cry from the days when its predecessor StarCalc could open Lotus and Quattro Pro files.

The good news is all of the features and formatting that were in place within my Excel workbooks came over without a hitch in Calc. At least as far as styles and sizes were assigned to the cells. How they actually looked was another matter.

While I would contend that there are quality areas where Microsoft products can outdo Linux applications (for now), Calc would certainly not be one of those times. This is a fast, stable, and very powerful spreadsheet application that could hold its own in any corporate office.

If only it didn't look so bad on screen. In every mode but the online preview view, the fonts are very aliased within Calc documents.

If the printer is configured correctly, then this problem is not a factor on hard copy. But getting a WYSIWYG version of exactly what the printout will look like is impossible. Nor is it a big problem if the document is shared with Office users. They will see the fonts exactly as they should.

So, in the grand scheme of things, this font issue is nothing more than an annoyance for the person actually working with the workbook in Calc, right?

Yes, but you and I know that the average user is going to take a look at that on-screen display and thing there's something wrong with Calc. Yes, this is a superficial aesthetic issue, but it is one that is hampering OpenOffice.

If there is a fix to this that I missed or if there's one coming, I welcome the addendum from the OpenOffice team. Calc should not be held back by something like this. This component of OpenOffice, even more than its Writer counterpart, has a definite place on the corporate desktop.

All it needs is a better look.