Re: Observations

[Morten Welinder <terra diku dk>]

   1) Gnumeric is SLOOOW compared to excel on the same machine (dual boot)

What, specifically, is slow?  The loading or some action after the load?

   2) If a column is selected (click on header) and filled (cut & Pasted
   formula), the fill goes all the way to row 65535.  The spreadsheet then
   slows dramatically as it seems to always want to calculate all 65000
   rows, even though only the first few thousand rows may have real data. 
   Excel appears (?) to use "virtual" rows after the real data to avoid
   this problem - hope this makes sense!  This can be fixed by selecting
   all rows after real data and deleting them - a kludge I think.

Hmm...  If you really see recalcs that are done for no reason, that
is a bug we need to find and squish.

   3) Related to 1 & 2, Gnumeric uses a lot of memory, to the point where I
   had a system crash when all 256M memory and 512M swap filled when trying
   to save a > 5Mbyte tab delimited ASCII file as a ".gnumeric" type -
   again excel just worked as expected (slow, not crash, that is!)

Known and fixable.  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66020


   4) Gnumeric's import feature stumbles over embedded control characters
   such as NULL and \x01 - excel just loads them and goes on.  I use a
   simple Perl script to clean the data now, but a more flexible import
   routine with a filter function may benefit some people (or the ability
   to select and filter through the script as a plug in? - now there's a
   neat idea!).  I have no control over how the data is created and just
   get handed a file from an unknown source, often without even knowing
   what program created it, so every task is a potential "adventure"

Known.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56862
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66808


   5) Being able to select "Treat two delimiters as one" (something like
   that) in gnumeric is not as flexible or useful as being able to "treat
   multiple delimiters as one" in excel.

Please provide more detail.

Using bugzilla is your best way of ensuring that your issues don't get
lost over time, btw.

Morten

(Try painting B2:IU65534 red in XL btw.  It also has problem with large
ranges.)