GNU Oleo is a discontinued lightweight

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cel ...

originally designed as a text-based spreadsheet using the

curses A curse (also called an imprecation, malediction, execration, malison, anathema, or commination) is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, ...

library. The last development version of Oleo, 1.99.16, was released in 2001.

History

The project was started in 1992 by Tom Lord, and became part of the GNU initiative around 1994.Clifford Smith, , BSD Today, August 2000 At the time, the only open source alternative was the older text-based sc, both products having similar functionality to early versions of

Lotus 123 Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles i ...

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro (comp ...

. Oleo's

key binding computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or a ...

s however were inspired from the Unix world, and similar to those used by the

emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

editor, which frustrated novice users familiar with the

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicatio ...

counterparts.Dean Oisboid
Novice to Novice

Linux Journal ''Linux Journal'' (''LJ'') is an American monthly technology magazine originally published by Specialized System Consultants, Inc. (SSC) in Seattle, Washington since 1994. In December 2006 the publisher changed to Belltown Media, Inc. in Houston ...

, August 1st, 1995 Oleo and sc were the first

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

spreadsheet applications to acquire a

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

.Vincent Granet
The Xxl Spreadsheet Project
April 1st, 1999,

Because Oleo was officially part of the GNU project, it was dubbed "GNU's response to Excel" in a 1996 article in iX magazine. It claimed to be "better than the high priced spread", a reference to old

oleomargarine Margarine (, also , ) is a spread used for flavoring, baking, and cooking. It is most often used as a substitute for butter. Although originally made from animal fats, most margarine consumed today is made from vegetable oil. The spread was orig ...

advertisements promoting margarine over the more expensive

butter Butter is a dairy product made from the fat and protein components of churned cream. It is a semi-solid emulsion at room temperature, consisting of approximately 80% butterfat. It is used at room temperature as a spread, melted as a condiment ...

. Oleo also worked well in a

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

environment; a FreeBSD port was available. By 1995, sc had acquired an

X Window The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

front-end called xspread, which added graphics capabilities. In 1998, Oleo acquired a Motif-like

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

, relying on the royalty-free

LessTif LessTif is a defunct free software reimplementation or clone of the Motif computer programming toolkit. The project aimed for full source- and binary-code compatibility with Motif. While this was not achieved, many Motif applications could run w ...

widget set. A

GTK GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and propriet ...

version was also under development. By 1999 Oleo was still judged as "not completely usable", due to the awkward graphical interface lacking in user friendliness like X-style

cut, copy, and paste In human–computer interaction and user interface design, cut, copy, and paste are related commands that offer an interprocess communication technique for transferring data through a computer's user interface. The ''cut'' command removes the ...

or tear-off menus. In the 1995 version, to type a number into a cell the user had to hit the "=" key first, similar to the early versions of Excel. This was later changed to typing a number directly, although typing a number in a cell that already contains one appends to it rather than overwrite it.Tuxtraining.com (March 23, 2008
Oleo: a commandline spreadsheet
/ref> Graphics are drawn using the device-independent library libplot, the centerpiece of the GNU

plotutils GNU plotutils is a set of free software command-line tools and software libraries for generating 2D plot graphics based on data sets. It is used in projects such as PSPP and UMLgraph, and in many areas of academic research, and is included in ...

. Oleo offers spreadsheet access to the

GNU Scientific Library The GNU Scientific Library (or GSL) is a software library for numerical computations in applied mathematics and science. The GSL is written in C; wrappers are available for other programming languages. The GSL is part of the GNU Project and is d ...

, a large collection of mathematical functions. It also offers some database connectivity, allowing access to

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

database via queries,

Xbase xBase is the generic term for all programming languages that derive from the original dBASE ( Ashton-Tate) programming language and database formats. These are sometimes informally known as dBASE "clones". While there was a non-commercial predec ...

and DBF file access. It has support for macro programming, and for printing purposes it supports

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

and

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

output.Michael M. Murphree
Top 10 Linux console applications

Linux.com Linux.com is a website owned by the Linux Foundation. The goal of the site is to provide information about the developments and changes in Linux and related products. Linux.com offers free Linux tutorials, news and blogs, discussion forums and ...

, April 26, 2005 Still, by 2000 it could not import Excel spreadsheets, while newer open source alternatives like

Gnumeric Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program that is part of the GNOME Free Software Desktop Project. Gnumeric version 1.0 was released on 31 December 2001. Gnumeric is distributed as free software under the GNU General Public License; it is intended to r ...

offered this feature, and could also import Oleo spreadsheets.Michael Hall (June 6, 2000
Suites for the Sweet: GNOME Office

LinuxPlanet QuinStreet, Inc. is a publicly traded marketing company based in Foster City, California. QuinStreet offers performance-based marketing and search engine marketing services. QuinStreet was founded in 1999, and has launched or acquired dozens of w ...

Oleo was still recommended as a console spreadsheet application in a 2005 article in

, but the reviewer warns that "I had expected Oleo to be more intuitive, but I needed multiple sessions with the info file before I could use it proficiently. Even cell reference syntax was not what I had expected." By default, Oleo uses numbers for both rows and columns; a cell reference uses a syntax like r12c26. A single Oleo process does not support the display of more than one file at a time, but

GNU screen GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexer, a software application that can be used to multiplex several virtual consoles, allowing a user to access multiple separate login sessions inside a single terminal window, or detach and reattach sessions from ...

or multiple terminals can be used as a work-around. Oleo supports editing the same spreadsheet in concurrent application instances.

References

External links

GNU Oleo Home Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gnu Oleo Discontinued software Oleo Free spreadsheet software 1992 software