From miguel Wed Dec 16 23:16:34 -0600 1998
From: Miguel de Icaza <miguel@nuclecu.unam.mx>
To: gnumeric-list@gnome.org
Subject: New version of Gnumeric has been released.
X-Lost: In case of doubt, make it sound convincing


Hello guys,

   A new version of Gnumeric has been released as part of the GNOME
libraries code freeze.

   I have not been very active the last two months in Gnumeric due to
the freezing of GNOME (I worked a lot on the file manager issues), but
I will soon be back working in the spreadsheet.

   Michael Meeks and Bruno Unna did an awesome job while I was doing
this: They added Excel file importing.  That is all I can say.  Some
stuff is missing, yes, it will get added, yes.

   During the last few weeks Morten Welinder has been reviewing the
Gnumeric code and making very good suggestions to the coding style as
well as making sure we keep Gnumeric in a nice way.  I am very
thankful for his input.

   Jakub Jelinek made the scrolling code be smarter than my previous
attempt at scrolling, it is now definetly usable.

   Code for attaching notes to cell is completely on the code.  The
only problem is that right now comment is hardcoded in the source
code.  We need a nice dialog box for this.

   Mark Probst added some Guile support (this as well as the other
plugins is completely optional), some neat things can be done with it,
make sure you check the distribution directory.

   Exponentiation has been implemented (all the code was there, I just
had forgotten to add the line to the grammar).

   Some more architectural work has been going on: named-cell range
code is there (not finished but there).  Also, some code for
referencing the cells in other sheets or workbook is there.

   I still need to figure out a way to encode this into the
expression.  I would appreciate any input on this issue: There are
various possible solutions, one of the is creating a special OP_ that
would represent a lookup into an non-local sheet.  The other is to
define this as a function and finally, it could be done as a special
cell type.

   Also, I have dropped the "entered_text" information I kept on the
cell.  Now the cell value is stored either as a value or as an
expression tree and decoded when the user requires it.  This was
required for a number of things (one of them being a nicer way to
share cell expressions during copying, and for the excel format and
the autofill code got definetly simpler and more maintainable).

   Various display and scrolling glitches were fixed as well.  But in
the process, I somehow broke the object-drawing code.  I have not
researched this yet.

   The initial support for CORBA is in, but it does not actually do
anything, it is just the setup for launching the Gnumeric server.
Owen Taylor made Gnumeric accept dragged files, you can now drag files
from the file manager into the spreadsheet, on this topic:  the date
routiens now use GLib's gdate instead of the gnome-libs libDate
routines.

   You can fetch it from:

      ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnumeric-0.4.tar.gz

Enjoy,
Miguel.