|
From humble beginnings the spreadsheet has become one of the most
useful tools on the computer desktop. Serving very many different
purposes, all essentially dealing with numbers, spreadsheets provide a
platform for tabulating numbers and automatically peforming operations
on those numbers. Spreadsheets today provide a comprehensive array of
functions for all kinds of purposes, together with impressive
graphical reporting facilities.
The Gnome desktop supplies the gnumeric spreadsheet modeled on
Excel.
When you start gnumeric for the first time you will get an
empty spreadsheet ready for your to work with, as in
Figure 41.1.
Figure 41.1:
Initial gnumeric screen with an empty spreadsheet.
|
|
A simple spreadsheet is used to illustrate the basic functionality of
gnumeric. The spreadsheet acts as a simple timesheet to
monitor time spent on particular tasks and to keep an accumulated
total earned. You might imagine your child keeping track of their
pocket money!
Figure 41.2:
A simple gnumeric spreadsheet illustrating thew
basic operation of the spreadsheet.
|
|
The Gnumeric spreadsheet is part of the Gnome desktop environment: a
project to create a free, user friendly desktop environment. As every
other component of Gnome, Gnumeric is free software (Some other people
like to call this OpenSource software) and it is licensed under the
terms of the GNU GPL.
Gnumeric will import your existing Excel, 1-2-3, Sylk, XBase and Oleo files. If you are a developer and you want to contribute
new importers (or polishing and perfect existing importers) we welcome your patches.
Gnumeric is intended to be a replacement for a commercial spreadsheet, so a lot of effort and work has still to go into it, but I
believe we have the right framework to do it.
Figure 41.3:
Sample Gnumeric screen
|
|
Subsections
Copyright © 1995-2006 [email protected]
|
