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Nimble, Excel-Compatible Spreadsheets for *nix? 50

Posted by timothy from the abiword-needs-more-imitators dept.
linguae writes "I'm running a FreeBSD desktop on a PC that has a 475MHz K6-2 processor with 64MB RAM. I use lightweight programs on my desktop such as Window Maker, AbiWord, and Firefox. I have been looking for a decent yet lightweight (and preferably Open Source) spreadsheet that is compatible with Excel, and also doesn't rely on dependencies such as GNOME or Java. I'm not an Excel power user, but sometimes I do have to share spreadsheets every now and then. I wonder if there is a spreadsheet equivalent of Abiword?"
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Nimble, Excel-Compatible Spreadsheets for *nix? More

Nimble, Excel-Compatible Spreadsheets for *nix?

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  • nimble spreadsheet (Score:5, Informative)

    by lscoughlin ( 71054 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @07:57PM (#10837172) Homepage
    Gnumeric is about as close as you're going to get.

    It's really quite nice...

    I'm not sure if it still has any gnome dependencies or not.

    But really
    abiWord:word::gnumeric:excel

    • Re:nimble spreadsheet (Score:3, Interesting)

      by squant0 ( 553256 )
      I'll second Gnumeric for being a quality spreadsheet app. I like it better then OpenOffice as its quicker starting up and the interface easier IMHO.

      Linux From Scratch lists depends on its site, as well as build instructions: Gnumeric-1.2.10 [linuxfromscratch.org]

      It seems to depend on a bit of Gnome-ish things. But having some Gnome stuff isn't a bad idea, and you don't _NEED_ all of Gnome for it to work.

      • Another option for spreadsheets on *BSD, besides Gnumeric, would be OpenOffice.org Calc [openoffice.org].

        But Gnumeric is a very good choice. Here is a detailed write up of Gnumeric. The Computational Statistics & Data Analysis Statistical Software Newsletter has a report reviewing Gnumeric vs MS-Excel titled Fixing Statistical Errors in Spreadsheet Software: The Cases of Gnumeric and Excel [csdassn.org] (Warning for PDF) Regardless, of which spreadsheet you use, it's worth a read. Some excerpts:

        When apprised of the errors in

        • Re:Actually, Gnumeric *is* much better (Score:4, Informative)

          by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @08:12AM (#10840778) Journal
          So, actually, Gnumeric *is* currently much better than MS-Excel. At least if the metrics are that it's statistical functions are more accurate and that bugs get fixed faster. I'd speculate that once Quattro was killed off, MS coasted on development of MS-Excel like it has done with MSIE after killing Netscape.

          On the contrary, I'd say Excel is by far the best product Microsoft makes, and it keeps getting better. The statistical problems are a legitimate criticism (and Gnumeric should be commended for doing a better job with them) but they mostly involve a few decimal places of accuracy in edge cases that matter to a vanishingly small number of users. The Excel developers haven't been rolling around in piles of money instead of fixing those algorithms -- they've been doing things like making references update seamlessly when a cell is moved, something none of the free spreadsheets comes close to doing.

          • Can you supply an example of where gnumeric does not update references as expected ? We know of a few corner cases involving moving the corner of a rectngular region, but on the whole we should cover everything. Please report any problem you find.
          • So, Excel is the best product MS makes - how does *that* relate to Gnumeric being or not being better than Excel, or to the claim that he Excel developers have been coasting, adding eye candy rather than useful features? I see nothing "on the contrary" there, except for some unfounded claim that Excel developers are working on the solution to an obscure problem while no one else is working on the same problem in the free software world?

    • Re:nimble spreadsheet (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Apreche ( 239272 )
      gnumerc is it, and everybody knows it. You don't have to have gnome in order to use it. But you do need GTK, which you have because you use abiword. And you have to have libgsf which has to be built with gnome support, but gnome itself is not really needed. If you use gentoo all this means is you have to put on the gnome use flag for just the libgsf package and gnumeric will work. You don't need to emerge gnome.

      Is that clear enough? I hope you understand.

      Hey, you can always use moodss, the module object
      • This is why Linux isn't ready for grandma.

        Isn't there an Apple II emulator on which you could use visicalc?

        --mike
        • Nothing with a learning curve is ready Grandma, even Windows. That's what grandchildren are for.
        • This is why Linux isn't ready for grandma.

          The original Ask /. was from a BSD user. BSD is not Linux.
          There are lots of spreadsheets which grandma can use on linux just as easily as excel on windows, but not on a PC that has a 475MHz K6-2 processor with 64MB RAM (read the original question). Actually, quite a few spreadsheets will run on a PC that has a 475MHz K6-2 processor with 64MB RAM. Will windows XP? XP is not ready for grandma if she owns a PC that has a 475MHz K6-2 processor with 64MB RAM.

          The specs
          • aah, this brings back memories...
            a while ago I was stuck with an pentium 133 Mhz, and 32 MB ram machine.. i installed red hat 7.1 (.2?) with KDE (and gnome) and it even ran OpenOffice!
            I even made it a multiboot with windows ME :)

            It swapped alot, but it worked :-)

    • Gnumeric (Score:3, Informative)

      by cbr2702 ( 750255 )
      I'm not sure if it still has any gnome dependencies or not.

      fullyautomatix root # emerge -p gnumeric | grep gnome
      [ebuild N ] gnome-extra/libgsf-1.9.0
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/libglade-2.4.0
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/libgnomeprint-2.6.2
      [ebuild N ] x11-themes/gnome-icon-theme-1.2.3
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/libgnomecanvas-2.6.1.1
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/libgnomeprintui-2.6.2
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/orbit-2.10.3
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/libbonobo-2.6.2
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/gconf-2.6.2
      [ebuild N ] gnome-base/gnome-mi

      • no, you did
        emerge -p'
        . this will only show what will have to be compiled on your system... you prolly already have a certain number of it's dependencies.
        what you should have done is
        'emerge -pe'
        which will show _all_ dependencies.
        • You're right, that would have been better, except that the box I ran it on is a mail server and doesn't have any gnome packages installed (or even X)

        • Well, that may be a bit over-zealous, as it lists things like bash and pam... Let's stick "tree" in there to organizes it a bit better, and clear out the use flage to reduce the number of optional packages (the lameness filter won't let me include all of the whitespace - argh!):

          xxx@xxx xxx $ USE='-' emerge -pe --tree gnumeric | cut -c 17-
          app-office/gnumeric-1.2.13
          dev-python/pygtk-2.2.0
          x11-libs/gtkglarea-1.99.0
          dev-python/pyopengl-2.0.0.44
          media-libs/glut-3.7.1
          x11-themes/gnome-themes-2.8.0
          x

    • I've found that Gnumeric's dependencies make it pretty much impossible to keep Gnumeric fully up to date. I imagine this isn't a concern if you're using debian-unstable or something, and constantly updating to the newest version of GNOME.

      The dependency that sticks in my mind while I was trying to keep Gnumeric up to date on SuSE is "libgsf", but that might be because that's where the trouble always started. I probably would have had more problems if I'd managed to resolve that. Is there some way to make st

  • OpenOffice (Score:5, Informative)

    by seinman ( 463076 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @07:57PM (#10837175) Homepage Journal
    OpenOffice runs on my P1/150mhz system with 48 megs of RAM. It starts up a little slow (30 seconds or so) but once it's going, has no problems. You can do a custom install so that you can use only the spreadsheet program without taking up the HD space on the word processor and presenation programs.

    • Re:OpenOffice (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cjpez ( 148000 )
      OpenOffice ran well enough on my P2/450Mhz system way back when. I would assume that by now they've made some kind of performance improvements to it too. Granted, it's not really what you would call "lightweight" but it'll get the job done, and it should be good performance-wise.

    • Re:OpenOffice (Score:3, Interesting)

      by eviljolly ( 411836 )
      I've also used OpenOffice on a low end machine (333mhz Windows NT 128MB/ram), and it ran just as well as Excel. I would suggest giving it a try.

  • Firefox lightweight? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by damiangerous ( 218679 ) <1ndt7174ekq80001@sneakemail.com> on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @07:58PM (#10837184)
    I use lightweight programs on my desktop such as Window Maker, AbiWord, and Firefox.

    Firefox is far from lightweight. It's a great program and all, but lightweight is the last word I'd use. Granted I don't use Windows, so maybe it's relative. I would say that Firefox is the single biggest resource sucking app I run on a regular basis. Not to mention it seems to have some sort of memory leak that makes me eventually have to close it (or it crashes).

    • Took a look at top and you're right. I was going to suggest Opera anyway. It's better, but still not lightweight enough for this guy.

      Opera 7.54 (shared) with 4 tabs open is using 82 Megs of RAM.
      FireFox 1.0-2 (Fedora Core 3) with the same 4 tabs open is using 123 Megs of RAM.
    • You're right about that. Firefox alone uses more memory than all of KDE and Konqueror combined. And they say KDE is bloated.

  • A fair few actually... (Score:5, Informative)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @08:01PM (#10837220) Homepage Journal
    http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Spreadsheets/

    An amazing tool google ... you ought to try it sometime....

    OTOH Gnumeric and / or OOo would be a good place to start. OOo xls compatibility is very good in my experience. Havent used Gnumeric for a while last time (several yrs ago) its xls compatibility was a tad ropey - Im sure its improved by now though!

    Nick

    • Havent used Gnumeric for a while last time (several yrs ago) its xls compatibility was a tad ropey - Im sure its improved by now though!

      I used it a while ago and found it fine for my purposes. Later I noticed an announcement by the lead programmer that it was now a feature complete Excel clone.

      Sure, it uses the Gnome libs, but you don't need to be actually running Gnome to use it.

    • OTOH Gnumeric and / or OOo would be a good place to start. OOo xls compatibility is very good in my experience. Havent used Gnumeric for a while last time (several yrs ago) its xls compatibility was a tad ropey - Im sure its improved by now though!

      That all depends on your definition(and the original poster's) of "compatibility". To open and view spreadsheets that were saved in Excel, yes, it is generally "compatible". If you are used to using Excel though, with formulas and calculations, they are all diff

  • Id there a reason whay you haven't tried Open/Star Office? [openoffice.org]

    I've been happy using it for several months. If you're not involved in extremely complex spreadsheets it should work fine.

  • sc -- for super lightweight... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by runswithd6s ( 65165 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @08:16PM (#10837338) Homepage
    Check out sc. Debian package information follows:
    Package: sc
    Status: install ok installed
    Priority: optional
    Section: math
    Installed-Size: 428
    Maintainer: Adam Majer <adamm@galacticasoftware.com>
    Architecture: i386
    Version: 7.16-2
    Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4), libncurses5 (>= 5.4-1)
    Description: Text-based spreadsheet with VI-like keybindings
    "Spreadsheet Calculator" is a much modified version of the public-
    domain spread sheet sc, which was posted to Usenet several years ago
    by Mark Weiser as vc, originally by James Gosling. It is based on
    rectangular table much like a financial spreadsheet.
    .
    Its keybindings are familiar to users of 'vi', and it has most
    features that a pure spreadsheet would, but lacks things like
    graphing and saving in foreign formats. It's very stable and quite
    easy to use once you've put a little effort into learning it.
    • Check out sc.

      sc takes a bit of getting used to, but it's incredibly small and startlingly powerful. I don't believe it's programmable, but it's got a batch mode so that it's trivial to call it from shell scripts and the like. It's definitely spreadsheeting done The Unix Way. I used it years ago to calculate X modelines, and it was great. (I could use it when X wouldn't start!)

      OTOH, it's not entirely user friendly to someone who isn't used to vi-like keybindings.

  • Ok, its not open source, but a globe-spanning company I used to work for did all of its office work with a unix office suite (CHUI interface!) called Cliq.
    Don't know if its still available, used to be about 30 bucks US a seat. Had a nice spreadsheet program (which was probably the best part of the suite). Maybe they have an X version now, I haven't look at Cliq in about 3 years. URL for Cliq:
    http://www.dr-quad.com/products.htm
    HTH

  • OO and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel (mostly OT) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by angst_ridden_hipster ( 23104 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @09:57PM (#10838251) Homepage Journal
    Is it just me, or does Open Office write something into its Excel-formatted files that breaks the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel package on CPAN?

    I find that some cells return the content type rather than the content when retrieving $cell->Value
    (e.g., "GENERAL" rather than "foo", which is the cell contents).

    If I use a spreadsheet saved from Excel it works; if I read it into OO, and save it out, I experience the problem.

    This is under Perl 5.8.1mumble on Mac OS X.
    • might want to actually bugreport that to the OOo people. or the maintainer for Spreadsheet::ParseExcel. Might have a higher chance of getting fixed then :-)

      -Leigh
      • I haven't exhaustively tested the situation yet.

        I just came across it yesterday, and haven't had a chance to do a rigorous test to prove that it's not something stupid I'm doing in my code.

        I was actually hoping that Wisdom of Slashdot would descend upon me, and someone would say "you *did* remember to [whatever I'm forgetting], didn't you?" so I could just say "doh!" and get my code to work. I'll be digging deeper in the next couple of days, and will be able to report back then.
    • Doh!

      After further testing, well, it is in fact just me.

      As pointed out by "Mr. Perl Foo," the more general approach of looking at $cell->{Val} will work correctly for either.

      My humble apologies to both the OO Team and the author of ParseExcel for casting unwarranted aspersions.

  • GNOME Depends are optional in next release (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jody Goldberg ( 61349 ) <jody@nOSpAM.gnome.org> on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @10:36PM (#10838568) Homepage
    The upcoming 1.4.0 release (due in the next few days) supports a --without-gnome configure time option that decreases functionality (no gnome-vfs means no direct http support), but still works nicely as a spreadsheet. We use this for our win32 port.

  • Use Open Office 2.0 snapshots (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JPyObjC Dude ( 772176 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @02:36AM (#10839884)
    I use open office 1.9.58. Its just a developer snapshot build but the improvements in 2.0 makes switching very easy. In particular, right clicks now first sets focus to event target before opening contextual menu (similar to Excel). It also includes format painter which is a great tool if you spend much time making your spreadsheets look nicer.

    If you are a hacker, Open Office also has language bindings to Java, Python, C++, JavaScript and many others so you can build some powerful applications and do things that is possible in Excel but the code would be very obfuscated and unreadable as is expected with M$ objects and VB API's.

    I am a power user of spreadsheets being a heavy user of Lotus 123 back in the early 90's and was switched to excel 5.0 back in 94 I think.

    OOO 2.0 looks extremely promissing and aparently they are putting in alot of performance improvements as well.

    Just remember, these 2.0 snapshots are intended for developers and you may get crashes (Although since about 1.9.4n I have not had many at all).

    JsD

  • DOSEmu (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SirPrize ( 590850 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:51AM (#10840290)
    How about DOSEmu running an old version of Lotus 1-2-3 or Quatro Pro? :-) Excel (with the proper file filters installed) can read and write to them, last I checked. And I can't imagine DOSEmu to be too resource intensive
  • How about the original? Visicalc.
    You can download it from Dan Bricklins website and run it under dosemu. It run under WindowsXP on my system. As far as light goes it is only 27k!
  • I know this isn't the answer you want. I know Gnumeric & OOo Calc are the answers you're going to get.

    But seriously, have you thought about getting a bit more RAM? SuSE7.3 w/ KDE and Calc from OOo PR1 runs cleanly - SURPRISINGLY well - on a PPro 200 with 128 MB of RAM. Starting applications, including those, is slow. Of course, it is also running softRAID on 5400rpm drives - in PIO, not DMA - and being a SAMBA & netatalk file server, among other things. Since you said you're from BSD - SuSE is

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