Joining OO.o too
August 24th, 2005 —I’ve been quiet for too long now. It’s time to say hi, re-join the
community, and do a bit of spreadsheet blogging.
For the last few months I’ve been working on OOo’s spreadsheet. Given the
choice between working on OOo and leaving free software I swallowed my pride
and made the leap.
To paraphrase the late Douglas Adams
‘OOo, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly
hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think there’s a lot of code
in emacs, but that’s just peanuts compared to OOo.”
There’s lot’s of neat stuff in here, and Michael has done some amazing work
getting it building mostly painlessly.
Gnumeric is still alive and well. The team is on track to release 1.6.0 (with
several nice improvements) along with gnome 2.12 in a few weeks. With luck
I’ll be able to cross-pollinate the projects.
My current project in OOo is to add support for R1C1 style references. The
core of the patch was simple. I was able to lift a blob of Gnumeric code I’d
written a few months back and dual license for inclusion in OOo. The tricky
bit is turning out to be the interface change that propagates the choice of
address style.