Re: Gnumeric 1.7.0. on Windows: comments/observations

[Jean Bréfort <jean brefort free fr>]

Le dimanche 15 octobre 2006 à 11:26 +0200, Christian Ritter a écrit :
> 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.

Known problem. It has been discussed earlier, but no agreement was
reached on how we could do that. Anyway, this is not win32 specific.

> 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.

Labels are something which should be implemented when developer becomes
available; as you wrote we are not at Xmas. Controling the styles via
data ranges would be quite difficult IMHO and is not planned.

> 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
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-- 
Jean Bréfort <jean brefort free fr>