I am involved in a fantasy play-by-mail Hockey league, the rules of which are fairly new to me as I'd only watched the old Solihull team in practice when I use to go ice-skating, so I'm learning. Any road up I thought I'd transport all my stats stuff over to my laptop, using all that KOffice has to offer.
First off, despite specifying Word Document format, KWord can't find any of the documents I used for writing out my team orders, even though they are mainly text with some tabulation for layout. Nothing too fancy. However, it never even gets to try filtering as even though i can point it at the right directory nothing is visible!
Next up I try KSpread to upload all my scouting info. Again nothing too spectacular, just names and various attribute values. Thankfully it loads, although for reasons only known to KOffice the thing takes at least 10 minutes to load! After a day with it taking eons to do anything I discover the default auto-save is set to 2 minutes. What kind of insane idiot decided an auto-save should every 2 minutes! Had it been 10 or 15 I could understand, but 2!!!!
Well I fixed that and started looking at why it was so cumbersome. No formulas, just over 500 rows and 20 columns. Nothin' fancy, but obviously too much for KSpread to cope with nicely. I guess it must just be a bit too meaty for it to handle.
After that I decided to try and create a simple lookup table on another sheet. A simple list of team names and abbreviations, only to discover that there is no included formula for a lookup and at the moment I can't figure out how to write a simple Perl script to do it myself. And to make matters worse there's little documentation as yet. Ahhhh!!!!!!
I have several more of my own formulas I want to transport to Perl, having previously used VBA in Excel, and KSpread isn't being friendly. Unfortunately I don't have the time to fiddle with the source and write my own formulas plugin bit so may well have to wait until someone else decided it's a good idea :(
I hate to say it, but Excel seems to has set a standard that others are taking awhile to catch up too.
PS: Please don't mentioned StarOffice, after 2 release disks, 1 cover disk and a ftp download, I've never got a working version. Maybe it just doesn't like me.
Re:Alternative
barbie on 2002-08-25T15:28:41
Prior to wiping my Hard Drive and installing RH7.3 I had downloaded GNumeric, but hadn't had the time to look into it. Thanks for the suggestion. I shall investigate further....
