Gnumeric 1.7.0. on Windows: comments/observations

[Christian Ritter <ritter stat ucl ac be>]

Dear gnumericists,

Here are a few observations on initial use of gnumeric 1.7.0 under windows:

1. Sliders (scroll bars):
When they are entered from the user interface under windows, only 
vertical sliders are displayed. But if one opens an excel file 
containing a horizontal slider via gnumeric, the slider is converted 
correctly into a horizontal control. This happens with both types of 
sliders: defined via the Excel/forms toolbox and the Excel/Control 
objects toolbox. This means that horizontal sliders are available in 
gnumeric but cannot be accessed via its user interface.
/aside: This also works under linux: connected the Windows partition 
using samba, opened the .xls file from gnumeric running under linux, all 
worked  perfectly.

2. Selling point: the *.gnumeric versions of workbooks is often a lot 
(factor 4) smaller than the corresponding .xls version.

3. Charts (XY): So far, gnumeric does not allow to add labels to 
individual points on an x-y chart. I would propose to add a labels 
property to the series object which can be linked to a range on the 
sheet. This way one can set the labels via another column in the data. 
This is something "calc" can do, but "Excel" cannot. It would be very 
useful, though. The icing on the cake would be if one could even control 
the label format (size, font, color, orientation) via data ranges, but 
Xmas is still far away.

4. Selling point: Charts: the max/min of the axes can be controlled from 
ranges. I've been asking this from Excel for a long time, to no avail.

5. Missing (big):
Getting data from ODBC data sources.
Pivot tables
Data tables (multiple calculations in "calc")

6. (already mentioned in a bug report): The (implicit) handling of some 
matrix calculations is inconsistent with what Excel does. On first 
sight, the Excel way is not all that "logical", but it's extremely 
practical. For example, Xmat*Weight where Xmat is a nxp matrix and 
Weight a nx1 vector results in WXmat where all columns of X are (scalar) 
multiplied by Weight. Gnumeric does this only for the first column. The 
same works when Weight is a 1xp vector. In this case the resulting WXmat 
has the rows of Xmat (scalar) multiplied by weight. A third example is 
the behavior of =if(vector=transpose(vector),1,0) . If the elements of 
vector are different, this generates an identity matrix under Excel. 
Under gnumeric, this doesn't work.

Greetings,

Chris