Re: newby questions

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Thu, May 31, 2001 at 12:56:47PM -0500, Priscilla J. Benson wrote:
> I am a new user of gnumeric(I think its version 0.54 which came with my

hmm, 0.54.  That is the primary source of problems.
That release is more than 1 year old, which is significant for a
product that is coming up on 3 years...

the current release is 0.65.  You will definitely want to upgrade.

> My first problem is that gnumeric refuses to save my excel format files. 
> First it asks if I want to overwrite, and when I say "yes", it says that
> "Saving over old files is disabled for safety".  I can save them as
We are strong believers in not over promising or hyping what we an
do.  Excel export has been around for a while, but we did not
consider it stable enough to overwrite data until recently.  Version
0.65 will optionally allow you overwrite when saving in xls format.

> and can I make it save over an older version?  If so, how?
As of version 0.65 if you define the environment variable
    GNUMERIC_ENABLE_XL_OVERWRITE
Gnumeric will enable overwriting xls files

> Can I set excel as default ?
> I read something in your listserve last
> week about making excel format default by wrigin something in
> plugin.xml, but I can't find plugin.xml on my computer.  What directory
> would the installation have put it in?  Or can I download it from
> somewhere?
The plugin.xml files are only available in newer versions.

> I see there is a "transpose" function listed on the list of functions, but
> I can't seem to make it work.  I did find that I can use the copy button
> and then paste special to copy it transposed, but I am converting about
> 100 older files with up to fifty transpose commands already in them.  Is
> there a secret to making transpose work, or does it exist only in paste
> special?
The transpose function is the same as the XL version.  It is what MS
Excel calls an 'array function'  If your sheets use the transpose
spreadsheet function we should import and implement it as does XL.
 
> I read that there are plugins, but don't know where they would exist on my
> computer and/or on the web and couldn't find an explanation on how they
> work in the help files.
They have moved since 0.54.
Modern Gnumeric uses
    <prefix>/lib/gnumeric/<version>/plugins/plugin_name
as the main source.  Users can also define plugins in their home
dir.  We have not documented their interface because it has been
changing.  The source code is unfortunately the best documentation
for now.

> Is there a "find" command anywhere in gnumeric.  I also have a database in
> an excel file.  With over 15,000 rows of stuff, I'd like an easier way to
> find a particular item without having to scroll through the whole thing.  

Newer versions have a search and replace dialog that can be used to
find things.