Excel is the spreadsheet program that everyone can use. From managing your monthly budgets to tracking a company's complex financial account,

it can pretty much handle everything you throw at it. However, it comes with its drawbacks-it's a part of the Microsoft Office package, does not support a few spreadsheet formats such as OpenOffice and tends to be a memory hog.
STYLE AND FEATURES: At first look, Gnumeric doesn't feel so very different from Excel 2003. You do not get some good functions from Excel such as the formula auditing toolbar. But it is a basic spreadsheet application that will help you keep track of information in tables and lists, perform complex calculations on numerical data, be it statistical operations or otherwise, and create and display graphs using bar, line, pie or radar type plotting devices. Since this is what most of us do most of the time, Gnumeric efficiently delivers on it. It has come a long way in file format compatibility.

The Gnumeric file format is compressed XML which can be decompressed using gunzip, the GNU gzip program's decompression utility, into text. Gnumeric can also open files from several well known proprietary and free spreadsheets including Excel, Lotus, Applix, Open Office, Psion, Sylk, XBase, Oleo, Plan Perfect, Ouattro Pro and HTML. Spreadsheets created in Gnumeric can be saved to several versions of the Excel file format, and also other aforementioned formats such as Open Office, Paradox, and Data interchange format; there is a PDF export option which allows you to cr.eate a PDF file of your spreadsheet application for easy document exchange. The latest release also comes with support for the Office Open XML ("OOXML") format which allows for basic import and export of these file types, though chart and embedded objects are not yet supported. PERFORMANCE: SO how does Gnumeric open other spreadsheets? Well, it opens an Excel spreadsheet (XLS) perfectly. We are talking about the works: tables with formatting options such as bold, underline and italics, symbols, borders and shading, complex equations, and bar and line graphs. Even opening up an OpenOffice. org spreadsheet (ODS) posed no trouble.

The Ouattro Pro (W01) spreadsheet didn't turn out to be too bad either, the only hitch was the line graph plot, and the problem with it was that the lines had sharp corners rather than soft curves. The question on everybody's mind is
probably" How well did it open an Excel 2007 (XSLX) file?" It did a decent job, though with a slight hiccup in the graph again-the regression value of the linear line disappeareq in the conversion process. The ability to automatically continue a series, formatting multiple cells with the same formula, creating charts with the 'Chart Wizard' and sorting selected cells are also available. According to a report published in the Statistical Software Newsletter published by Computational Statistics and Data Analysis it has attained a higher level of accuracy against its rivals with this release. In fact, the results of a study conducted by Dr. B. D. McCullough, of Drexel University in Philadelphia, which compared the statistical errors in the spreadsheet applications Excel 2003 and Gnumeric concluded that users who need to produce documents with better statistical accuracy should use Gnumeric. In terms of physical memory usage as compared to Excel, it boasts a virtual size of 71,412 KB against Excel 2003's 115,256 KB. That means that Gnumeric is a whopping 60 percent smaller in size when compared to Excel.
FOR: Extensive file format compatibility. AGAINST: Can't create macros in Gnumeric.