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Comment by yummypaint | Hacker News Reader

I think I've tried every spreadsheet program still being maintained at this point. Try gnumeric, it's a clear cut above everything else.

Mandatory Excel rant: Excel can't be trusted with data destined for publication. It's bloated, buggy as hell, user hostile, and has set genetics research back with its utterly braindead autocorrect. The default plot options are the exact polar opposite of how data are presented in science, and almost impossible to make serviceable. Everything Excel touches ends up looking like a hastily thrown together 6th grade science project. Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data, but hey it's free and not a decades old flagship product from a multi billion dollar tech company.

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> Try gnumeric, it's a clear cut above everything else.

Gnumeric rocks, even features Montecarlo built-in, I have it installed in my personal machine, but a major limitation is that they stopped providing windows builds, up to the last time I checked, so I can't use it at work.

>> Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data

As a user of Libreoffice for years, me thinks you are doing fud.

I'm also a Libreoffice user and have been since its inception. It's good software and I recommend it to people. The fact is just that gnumeric is better than calc. Not just in terms of features or feel either. I have personally lost data in calc spreadsheets that gnumeric handles without issue.

Hey, I'm very interested in this because LibreOffice annoys me and I can't explain why. It's not the "dated look" that everybody complains about; but I suspect it's related to UX somehow.

Could you articulate why Gnumeric is better than everything else?

To start, your calculations will be correct unlike with Excel

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076

https://exceloffthegrid.com/excel-calculate-wrong-results/

From your second link

> Therefore, the problem is not necessarily with Excel. Equally, the problem is not with the IEEE 754 standard either. It’s just the complex nature of the world of mathematics and computing that we live in.

Excel the one who decided to use only 15 digits. It is an Excel problem...

The IEEE 754 standard covers decimal floating point arithmetic, too. Decimal floating point avoids issues like 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 not being equal to 0.3 despite usually being displayed as 0.3. Maybe it's reasonable to use that instead?

Some earlier spreadsheets such as Multiplan used it (but not in the IEEE variety) because it was all soft-float for most users anyway.

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