Study Recommends Gnumeric Over MS Excel

Jody Goldberg writes "A recent study of analytic quality, and responsiveness to problems strongly preferred Gnumeric in place of MS Excel. With new problems popping up in Office XP the case for spreadsheet users to migrate is only getting stronger. In some related Gnumeric quickies, a new stable version 1.2.6 was released, and Open has done an interview with the Maintainer."

Re:I use excel all day

[KeyserDK]

Have you actually tried gnumeric 1.2.x?

Other than VBA stuff i don't think there is anything excel does that gnumeric can't.

Get garnome!

[MooKore 2004]

The easiest way to get new versions of Gnome software is via garnome!

Garnome 0.30.1 was just released and it features the latest version of Gnome (2.5.5), The new, non ugly file dialog (but not all programs use it yet) and of course, Gnome Applications, including Gnumeric 1.2.6.

It is designed for IA-32 Gnu/Linux, but it should work on most OS's. Download it now [gnome.org].
And if you liked the power of garnome, you may be interested in the power of Gentoo Linux [gentoo.org], which is like garnome for your entire distribution!

Err...

[0x0d0a]

/dev/urandom is not /dev/random. When the entropy pool is exhausted (which will happen extremely quickly if producing a large set of random numbers for statistical work), instead of blocking it will use a hash algorithm. /dev/urandom varies unpredictably between being unpredictable and being very unpredictable.

On the other hand, when doing a study, frequently you *do* want to be able to use the same seed to produce exactly the same results. This is a legitimate failing in gnumeric. Not all random numbers are created equal. :-)

For what it's worth, I did (simple) analysis of a large set of random number generators for a high school science fair project. The Microsoft RNG (which has been used ever since at least early QBASIC days) is pretty decent, at least from a uniformity standpoint.

Re:I use excel all day

[Trelane]

FWIW, StarOffice/OpenOffice has StarBASIC, which is very similar to VBA.

Gnumeric is scriptable with Python.

Re:Gnumeric 0wns

[AndyElf]

If you take a look at linked page, you'd see:

gconf is our last remaining hurdle to a win32 build.

Re:Stupid Rant

[kannibal_klown]

Fortunately, for home users, we can get the Academic version for about $150. It comes with everything except Access (which I could care less about anyway... I use MySQL).

Granted, you can't use it for commercial purposes, but it's fine for home users that just need to read / write Word and Excel files. The Academic version in retail outlets no longer requires you to provide proof-of-acadmic-status. You just pick it off the shelf, and pay for it at the register.

However, I can't justify a constant upgrade cycle of $150 per version, especially considering how little changes with each revision. But if you're buying a new PC, it's not so bad (damn that product activation).

P.S.
Office: Mac ver. X is by far the best Office I've used on any platform.

Re:Solver:?

[Jody Goldberg]

Gnumeric has both goal seek and solver. Indeed it has several variants of solver included.

Re:Err...

[Hasie]

I once had to compare two genetic algorithm implementations, and genetic algorithms use LOTS of random numbers. The algorithms were supposed to produce the same results, but the one was faster than the other. To ensure they really gave identical results I used the same sequence of "random" numbers in both algorithms by using a fixed seed to the random number generator.