I've been using Linux on the desktop for years and have never missed Microsoft Office (except for Project, a little bit). Now seeing R1C1 notation is making me want Excel... Any recommendations for FOSS spreadsheet software that supports R1C1 notation or that is generally better than LibreOffice Calc?
The most interesting spreadsheet is http://siag.nu/siag/, but it's obviously not what you're looking for.
Honestly? Excel is a premier application, that microsoft spends extreme amounts of effort making great. There isn't a FOSS spreadsheet program that really comes close. It's not that there can't be, it's that the excel line is moving faster forward than current FOSS spreadsheet projects.
To be honest I'd recommend an Office 365 subscription and use Excel in the browser, if you are unwilling to get a mac/windows installation with a desktop app.
Perhaps its a 'purest' mentality, but if you're going to learn how to use a spreadsheet app, may as well learn the one that is most well known and widely used. As the video shows, Google Apps, Numbers, and the rest of them really are missing core features.
Joel didn't even get into VBA scripting - thats some advanced stuff that once you realize you need it, but you're stuck in Google Apps...... well, maybe this crowd is smart enough just to make a web app to solve the issue haha! Myself? I stick to Excel.
The point is that it is much more intuitively understandable what happens when you fill whole columns with that formula.
In R1C1 notation it's obvious because the formula doesn't change. In normal notation the exact same thing happens under the hood, but the cell references you're seeing change.
I recently had to use a spreadsheet for a first time in a few years, and LO Calc seemed to be dramatically better than OOo Calc back when I last used it.
Thanks - I used Gnumeric on a netbook for a long time. It was indeed a good choice at a time when I needed something very lightweight. I do recall it being quite limited, however... I'd be pretty surprised if it had more of the features Joel Sposky was showcasing than Open/LibreOffice Calc.
It's been a year or two since I've used it, but the last time I checked, it hasn't improved all that much. It was generally rather slow and limited.
This is really a shame, because of Gnumeric's history. It was (along with Gimp) one of the very first GTK applications, and present at the beginning of the Gnome desktop suite.
