Wednesday 29 November 2017

Gnumeric ...

At various times I've said in my hand waving way that you could as easily use Gnumeric as a spreadsheet for recording data as use excel or a more heavy weight alternative  product such as Libre Office Calc.

However I've got to confess I've never actually used it for real work.

That may be about to change as my corporate supplied copy of excel has started wingeing about product activation failures. I'm sure it's just an expired licence key, and not being on the corporate network it can't see the licence server to update.

The only problem is that as a volunteer archivist I can't contact corporate IT support directly, my boss has to log the job, and just by chance she's overseas at the moment.

It's not a drama - for the moment everything seems to work, I can still create and save data, but just in case there's a grace period that's about to expire on me I installed the latest commonly available windows version of Gnumeric this morning so I can keep working if I get locked out.

If I end up using it in anger I'll post on my experiences ...

[update 20/12/2017]

Well, everything kept on running until my boss got back from overseas, and even though my first attempt to contact IT support was stymied by a power outage, I did get on to them, and with a combination of remote access via TeamViewer and my being a meat puppet when we required we got a new product key despite not being on the corporate network.

But having spruiked Gnumeric, I guess I should come up with a little side data collection project to see how well it works out ...

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