faq
flatforty
contribute
subscribe
configure
search
rdf
main
parent
|
It's good to see commitment to Kspread
by Eric Laffoon on Thursday 24/Jul/2003, @22:39
|
It's nice to read this. I built version 1.2 and then I tried 1.3 beta. The beta was much faster but for some reason it's been unstable lately, so I built CVS and it's been very frustrating. Save As has taken it all down and I've been renaming autosave files which then save fine. I did do a parallel CVS build and was using qt-copy but I've switched back and I'm rebuilding KDE 3.1.2 and CVS. Maybe things will be more stable. Right now in CVS linking to a cell on another page and doing an "if" to compare the text has it comparing accurately if I manually enter the text but not if I paste it. Text comparisons are also case sensitive too, which I don't think users expect, as well as "==" being the comparison operator while I don't think "=" is an assignment operator. It's okay for me as a programmer, but for joe user...
I really love spreadsheets, and I miss Mesa/2 on OS/2 which I beta tested extensively. There are a few things I find really frustrating on Kspread. I have not found an easy method to create date sequences. I'm trying to recall if I succeeded last time. It's not inuitive, and Kspread seemed intuitive when I first tried it. I also can't figure out how to use cell references to adjust formulas based on the cell or row and I can't seem to find sumproduct to multiply two columns. I know, just like with Quanta, you can only do so much, but for me the problem seems to me that I can't really seem to do work on Kspread without the love/hate aspect. OO Calc has great stuff but it's a dog and dog ugly. I wish Kspread were just a bit better. Also areas it seems to have gone back downhill are in building formulas by point and click. A number of times a click just leaves an error where the operator is there without a cell reference during edits. Clicking across pages seems completely disfunctional using CVS on KDE 3.1x. Also find and replace no longer seems to have the power to look inside cells. I also see no easy way to detect the last cell with data in a range. That would be handy. Other things I miss are the custom features to build combobox lists and scripts... I should say something good. My wife is now a spreadsheet junkie too and other than having to break things down to smaller sheets she has no complaints and does everything under the sun on Kspread. I'm just more demanding. ;-)
While we're at it I have a request. It looks like DCOP may be good enough to enable poking data into cells and such. What would be really sweet is the ability to call a shell command with parameters. Then I could easily use Kommander for custom data entry on little spreadhseet apps. It wouldn't take much to get these two to do great things together. I should probably get involved in advanced testing... I just have my hands so full with Quanta, but I really want Kspread to be great. BTW the coolest thing with Mesa/2 was it's dynamic object copy feature. You could create a formula in cell E3 and drag copy down to E15. Then you could edit the formula with a correction in E3 and E4:E15 would change automatically. It was fun helping to spec a lot of interface features there too... |
|
|
![[KDE Dot News]](http://www.kde.org/dot/Images/kdedotnews.gif)
