thanks for the suggestion i just installed it (macos). it solved problem #2, I'll have to wait and see what happens with #1 and #3. I like it but it's like going to a new grocery store and everything is in a different place than i am used to thanks!
Oh, another nifty feature of gnumeric: if you save it in its uncompressed format, it's literally .xml (good both for version control and for scripting certain kinds of things)