Gnumeric 1.8 Series Released

["Morten Welinder" <mortenw gnome org>]

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The Gnumeric Team is pleased to announce the availability of Gnumeric
version 1.8.1.
This is the first publicly announced version of the new stable 1.8 series.

We have worked hard at producing the best available spreadsheet for a wide range
of applications from simple numerical scratch pad, financial analytical tool, to
scientific number cruncher.

It has been a little more than two years since the release of the 1.6
series and many
things have been improved:

* Improved Graphs

  There are several new types of charts. Further, we now support
regression lines fully.

* New Print Engine

  Gnumeric now uses the Gtk+ library's printing engine. This fixes a
number of printing
  problems caused by the unmaintained Gnome Print library. That being said, it
  appears that Gtk Print (and/or lower level libraries) still has
major issues on Win32.

* Improved Function Compatibility

  In order to facilitate spreadsheet sharing for users of Gnumeric
with users of other
  spreadsheets, we strive to make the sheet functions sematically
equivalent to their
  Excel counterparts, insofar Excel has such counterparts. However, we do not
  replicate bugs, inaccuracies, or arbitrary limits on for example
argument sizes.
  To this end, we have improved and automated our test suite.

* Improved and Extended File Format Support

  Most import and export filters have seen significant improvements.
For example,
  the XLS loader now handles charts much better.  We also now have a certain
  level of support for ODF and OOXML import and export.

For further release notes, see
    http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/announcements/1.8/gnumeric-1.8.shtml
For lists of issues fixed during the 1.7 development cycle, see
    http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/announcements/1.7/index.shtml
    http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/announcements/1.8/index.shtml

Morten Welinder
terra gnome org
On behalf of the Gnumeric Team