On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote: > > I think [putting formula results into the XML] this is > > reasonable. A case in point that I know of is the > > econometrics program, gretl. gretl can read a variety of > > formats including gnumeric XML, but it can't do anything with > > gnumeric files that use formulas: it's easy to read XML with > > libxml2, but not so easy to replicate gnumeric's calculation > > apparatus. > > > > Gnumeric is out of line with other spreadsheet programs in this > > respect. (In most respects gnumeric is better than the others, > > but not this one.) > > Gnumeric support an xml file formats that contains the values (Open > Document Format) and an xml file format that does not. Yes some users > may like to access the values in the xml file but others would surely > prefer not to have those (for them) unnecessarily bloated files.
OK, it's a balancing act. Gnumeric files are nice and slim compared to most spreadsheets -- but I think they would remain comparatively slim even with formula-results added (given the economical XML structure and gzip compression). Your point, that the gnumeric user can choose to save in a format that includes results, is true, but does not cut much ice in terms of user-friendliness. I encountered this in writing data importers for gretl. I could, for example, tell people to save their Excel data as CSV, which is trivial to import. But people resist that; they'd like for gretl to read their XLS files directly. Similarly, it would be nice to be able to import gnumeric data directly rather than directing people to save in a foreign format. Allin Cottrell _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
