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

We have improved our support for various file formats:

The Gnumeric team does not envision using the OpenDocument Format as its native format.

The spreadsheet part of ODF, in its current form, is ill defined and has many, many problems. For example: (1) there is no meaningful discussion of what functions a spreadsheet should support and what they should do. Without that, there is little point in trying to move a spreadsheet from one program to another; (2) there is no provision for sharing formulas between cells; (3) there is no implementation -- writing an ODF exporter consists of reverse-engineering OpenOffice to see what parts of the standard it can handle. (Note: the preceding comments relate to the spreadsheet part of ODF only; we do not have an informed opinion on ODF for word processing documents, for example.)

We may revisit this decision in the future, should the situation improve. In the meantime, we will strive to maintain a reasonable importer and exporter.

Getting Gnumeric

Gnumeric 1.8 is available from the Gnumeric home Page.

Looking Ahead

The 1.8 series is not the end of the line. You can see some of our future plans at our to-do list and our list of frequently asked questions contains the answers to common questions about features.

Thanks

Gnumeric is the result of contributions from a lot of people. Currently active contributors are:

Other recent contributors include: Oliver Burnett-Hall, Hib Eris, Nils Kanning, Nick Lamb, Eduardo Lima, Joseph Pingenot, Klokan Pridal, Philo Vivero, Harun Vos, Götz Waschk, Luciano Miguel Wolf, Ivan Y. C. Wong, and Shixin Zeng. (Please let us know if we have left anyone out!)

Gnumeric relies heavily on other projects: the Perl Compatible Regular Expression engine, The R Project, the GNU Linear Programming Kit, the lp_solve mixed integer programming solver, and of course GNOME.

Thanks are owed to the many people who have contributed patches during Gnumeric's development. Especially for the translators who wade through the tremendous volume of text in Gnumeric and deserve a lot of credit for dealing with the abstruse terms and jargon: