Re: gnumeric XML doesn't show result of formula

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:

> > I think [putting formula results into the XML] this is 
> > reasonable.  A case in point that I know of is the 
> > econometrics program, gretl.  gretl can read a variety of 
> > formats including gnumeric XML, but it can't do anything with 
> > gnumeric files that use formulas: it's easy to read XML with 
> > libxml2, but not so easy to replicate gnumeric's calculation 
> > apparatus.
> > 
> > Gnumeric is out of line with other spreadsheet programs in this 
> > respect.  (In most respects gnumeric is better than the others, 
> > but not this one.)
> 
> Gnumeric support an xml file formats that contains the values (Open
> Document Format) and an xml file format that does not. Yes some users
> may like to access the values in the xml file but others would surely
> prefer not to have those (for them) unnecessarily bloated files. 

OK, it's a balancing act.  Gnumeric files are nice and slim 
compared to most spreadsheets -- but I think they would remain 
comparatively slim even with formula-results added (given the 
economical XML structure and gzip compression).

Your point, that the gnumeric user can choose to save in a format 
that includes results, is true, but does not cut much ice in terms 
of user-friendliness.  I encountered this in writing data 
importers for gretl.  I could, for example, tell people to save 
their Excel data as CSV, which is trivial to import.  But people 
resist that; they'd like for gretl to read their XLS files 
directly.  Similarly, it would be nice to be able to import 
gnumeric data directly rather than directing people to save in a 
foreign format.

Allin Cottrell