On Monday, February 14, 2011 10:18:14 pm Andreas Guelzow wrote: > Gnumeric is intended to produce essentially the same calculation results > as Excel (+- some obvious bug fixes.) As a consequence empty cells have > to produce 0 when used in a calculation. > > I am looking forward to see your spreadsheet implementation. >
Why? As you mentioned there is already Excel, Minitab, SPSS, SAS JMP, and other enterprise solutions out there. Many of these either have computational errors, are not user friendly or like SAS JMP have too many bells-and-whistles to make them useful for entry-level/instructional purposes and many just don't work as well as Gnumeric even though they are (quite) expensive. The nice thing about Gnumeric is that it has and continues to fill the niche left open by these other (non-open source/non-free) spreadsheet apps by simply being better at what it does. I hope that finding smart, intuitive, and user- friendly ways of overcoming the deficiencies of these other apps will continue to be a primary development goal of Gnumeric. This 2008 paper discusses some of these very issues but also highlights the niche that Gnumeric actually does fill and points out the weaknesses of Excel 2007: Computational Statistics & Data Analysis Volume 52, Issue 10, 15 June 2008, Pages 4602-4606 As a Gnumeric developer, do you really mean to say this? >Gnumeric is intended to produce essentially the same calculation results > as Excel (+- some obvious bug fixes.) As an end-user using Gnumeric in an instructional setting, all I can do (supposed to do?) when I (or my students) find something appearing in a new version that is non-intuitive, difficult, or seeming to give unintended results is to report them back to the developers. For most users, Excel compatability is just a plus and likewise R compatability is just a plus -- not the real deal maker/breaker. I doubt most Gnumeric users see these as the main reasons they use Gnumeric. 1) Gnumeric is _much_ easier to use than Excel and tends to give more correct analyses 2) it's a spreadsheet app and so although limited in some ways much easier to get into than learning R/Matlab/SAS or whatever. If Gnumeric starts getting away from 1) and 2) then it's losing the niche. I doubt Excel/R/Matlab/SAS or whatever would ever bother to fill the niche however. They've had all the time and resources and still have not wanted or been able to do it. Probably some other open-source thing would end-up coming along -- but I doubt anybody would view that turn of events as a success. Gnumeric is already here -- why not try to make it as good as it can possibly be at filling the niche it does? P.S. About 1/3 of my students now use Mac... and that number is growing each year. Xcode+Macports+Gnumeric continues to provide for them a much needed (if not at times harrowing) lifeline to Gnumeric. _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list gnumeric-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
