On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Andrew Parsloe <apars...@clear.net.nz> wrote: > Yes, but it would be nice to be able to sum a table in LyX without having to > fire up Gnumeric or Excel or whatever. > It sure would.
> (To take matters to extremes, you > could even fire up an external wordprocessor and create a pdf or latex > document and import into LyX, but we don't. LyX is so much better and more > fun to work in.) > I understand your concern, but adding true spreadsheet capabilities to LyX would be a massive undertaking, and something to which some developers would object. LyX is by design a very flexible beast that allows you to interact with a huge (and growing) number of external tools: LaTeX, DocBook, BibTeX, R, Maxima, etc., etc. As far as I'm concerned, LyX does provide spreadsheet capabilities via the Gnumeric external material. It allows you to create and maintain your tables in a mature spreadsheet tool (something that LyX would never provide natively), and _dynamically_ import the results into your LyX documents. Personally I couldn't ask for more. (Think of it as graphics creation: you do not create them in LyX; you use some external tool to either create a final PDF and import into LyX, or to dynamically manage via external material). Cheers Liviu
