Hello fellow primates, We have taken a long time to release Gnumeric 0.42, because major changes were being done to the rendering engine of Gnumeric. Release 0.41 was done just to clearly mark the "era change" in the internals of the program. During the past few weeks the Gnumeric hackers have worked hard to improve the user interface of Gnumeric. Jody called this "Eye Candy Gnumeric". He spent weeks addressing various user interface issues. * Availability, source code. ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnumeric * Style engine change. If you are an avid Gnumeric user, you would have noticed that Styles did not always behave the way you wanted to. Basically. We had a way too thick style granularity, which meant that some attributes were tied to others (ie, it was not possible to set only the bold attribute, we used to set the entire font for the cells). Michael took on the rather complex task of revamping the entire way we manage styles internally, and the result is a cleaner setup in which we can actually render all the styles properly and we do what the user expects. This work was pretty hard, as even if conceptually it is cleaner, many optimization tricks had to be done, and a lot of hard code had to be hacked. Michael has now done all of this and enabled us to do a lot of nice tricks now. * GUI improvements Jody has worked very hard on the new Cell Format dialog box, which now mimics the one from Excel and has finished the rendering engine to support all the modes that you can customize. This means we have now: border support (various border types, of course, and they always match the Excel ones, for obvious reason), patterns, foreground, background are painted emulating Excel. Jody also improved our context sensitive popup to contain nice icons :-) JP improved the sort dialog as well by switching it to Glade. Federico improved the dragging behaviour in the print preview code. * New functions and fixed functions. * Jukka implemented IRR() and XIRR() finantial functions. * Jukka also fixed the database criteria functions. * Jukka fixed the non-numeric return values from DGET() * Jukka fixed one-dimmensional GROWTH() and TREND() functions. * Improved documentation * Jukka improved the database documentation * Jody extended the number format documentation and included more figures. * Embarassing bugs killed Cells that were referenced from a series did not get recomputed properly, and I am the sole person to blame and people usually resorted to queuing a recomputation (F9 key) to get the proper results. Nat and I are running our company finances on Gnumeric, so it was important to fix this one for a very personal reason :-) It was a hard problem to track down, but the solution was very simple and elegant and I am very confident of the resulting computation engine. * Import filters * We have got a basic Oleo file importer from Robert (only numbers and text are currently imported). * We have got a Sylk file importer from Jeff Garzik * We can now export to CSV (Jeff again) * Jody fixed CSV importing (it was crashing for a few people). * Frank improved our summary import/export and we are pretty much complete now. He also re-structured the internals for this. * Random things * Morten kept the memory leaks down and keeps helping us to keep the code clean. * As usual, the translators have done a great work at keeping Gnumeric translated to various languages. * Pending things * I have been working on the graphics component. This is not finished, and it is not available on the tar file distribution, you can only get this one from the CVS. Looking good, but not yet deployable. Enjoy, miguel.