New COUP*() test files and more about Gnumeric performance

[Nick Lamb <njl98r ecs soton ac uk>]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2002 at 06:48:17AM -0700, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> You can import these files using the experimental sax importer and you 
> will need much less memory during the opeing phase.

BUT this is import only and Gnumeric still bloats when you SAVE anything,
plus why does the non-SAX loader bloat Gnumeric permanently? I'm sure
Jody said that Gnumeric was leak free, didn't he? Also, the SAX loader
is smaller but it's no faster, still takes 4 minutes to load 5000 lines.

No matter, the XLS file created from these .gnumeric files is corrupt,
crashing both Gnumeric and MS Excel. So we have to try something else...

After fiddling with column formats I exported DIF files, rewrote the
formulae and produced some new test files. They are a little different,
I hope I didn't destroy the financial wizardry concealed behind this
big pile of numbers.

The resulting XLS files load quickly and efficiently into Gnumeric,
don't bloat it up and are generally much nicer. Maybe we should adopt
this ".XLS" format as the native format of Gnumeric ? ;)

In the end I saved my first set from Excel XP, each file is a Uniform
5.7MB because they all contain the same amount of data from Excel's
perspective (functions are just 16-bit values) To get them go to

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~njl98r/excel/

The file xpcoup.zip is a set of files from Excel XP testing each of
COUPDAYSBS() COUPDAYS() COUPDAYSNC() COUPNCD() COUPNUM() and COUPPCD()
using the same input dates, frequency, and basis as before. I will also
create XL 2000 and XL 97 versions when I get a chance.

> Adrian tried to load them into gnumeric, export them into XL files, but 
> thten opening in XL failed. I hope Jukka still has the original XL files 
> we might be able to use.

Gnumeric (and/or libole2) is trashing these files during export. Please
have a look in Bugzilla and see if there is already a bug for that.

Nick.