Re: Gnumeric as a text mode table editor? Is it even a useful idea?

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 11:48:54PM +1000, Alan E Davis wrote:
> Having just read a scathing review of spreadsheets in general
> (though I don't recall where) got me to thinking that much of what
> I do with Gnumeric at this point is not based on numbers, but as a
> text formatting device.  So looking around, as a keen emacs user,
> I found table.el, a table editing package for emacs.  It is
> somewhat more useful for my needs---I have to write weekly lesson
> plans in a blocked out format, with five columns of cells of
> various heights.
>
> The table.el package allows me to work with fewer reformats.  With
> Gnumeric I have built up a block format that is quite nice, but I,
> at least, have found cutting and pasting to require a lot of
> fixing of border lines, etc.  I spend a lot of time in the "format
> cell" area, patching things up after making changes, cutting and
> pasting, etc.  With table.el, one can edit cells in a more direct
> manner, and alter horizontal cell sizes as cells fill up.  And I
> can format for LaTeX output, which works quite well, even though
> it's not as straightforward on the wysiwyg side, and requires a
> bit of kludging to get to a neatly printable form.
>
> I would gladly hear of others's solutions to this problem---do
> spreadsheets even do this at all?  A text based mode for a
> spreadsheet seems so useful, I wonder whether I'm missing
> something.

Sounds like what you'd like would be to add a new autoformat.  We
have a fairly powerful toolset for specifying how to layout the
styles.  Have a look at the styles in
    Format -> Autoformat

There is no gui tool for creating an autoformat just yet, but the
styles are stored in the same format as .gnumeric so you can easily
generate those.

Descriptions are in
    <prefix>share/gnumeric/<version>/autoformat-templates/