Gnumeric -- The GNOME spreadsheet program
Miguel de Icaza <miguel@kernel.org>

This is the Gnumeric, the GNOME spreadsheet program.  

Gnumeric is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL included in the
file COPYING.

The goal of this spreadsheet is to become as powerful as other
spreadsheets on the market and do this cleanly and smartly.  We have
to do this while being as compatible as possible with Excel.

   If you are familiar with Excel, you should be ready to use
Gnumeric.  We have tried to clone all of the good features and stay as
compatible as possible with Excel in terms of usability.  

   Gnumeric is still a young program and it is advancing steadily.  If
you are interested in contributing to the development of Gnumeric, you
probably will want to read the doc/Design file.  I have scribbled my
ideas on how Gnumeric should be developed in the future in the file
doc/Future-Roadmap.  

Notes regarding plugins
-----------------------

   The current plugin setup in Gnumeric is just a way to dynamically
load code at runtime into the address space of Gnumeric: they use and
invoke pieces of Gnumeric code directly.  This means that any plugin
written under this scheme has to fall under the license of the GNU
GPL.

   In the future, an alternative method based on CORBA will be
provided and then it will be possible to create Gnumeric plugins with
other license, until then, the only setup available requires plugins
to fall under the GNU GPL license.

Mailing lists
-------------

    There is a mailing list used to discuss Gnumeric, to subscribe
send a mail to:

	gnumeric-list-request@gnome.org

    And in the body of the message write "subscribe"


Random notes:
-------------

This is a partial list of Features implemented in Gnumeric, we need
documentation for these:

	- Autofill
		Number autofill (computes delta, autofills from that)
	 	String autofill (daynames, months are built in).
		String+Number combo integer autofill
		Formula autofill.

	- Drag and drop selection.
		Select an area and use the border to drag the
	 	contents (shift/control/alt are modifiers to copy
		or move)

	- Selection
		- Multiple selection is supported, hold down control
		  key to augment the existing selection (it might be
		  discotinuous).

		- Walking selection
		  Use return/tab and shift-return/shift-tab to capture 
		  information in a selection.

		- Fill quickly a region with the same text: just enter
		  the text in a selection and press contorl-enter.

	- Number formatting
		- The formatting of numbers is very powerful, we do
		  emulate the Excel number formatting specifciation.

		- Format rules: you can use rules to specify which
		  format to use

		- Format colors: you can specify a color to format
		  with in the format.

	- Column/Row resizing
		- Drag the column/row division to adjust the column
		  and row dimenssions.

		- To make changes to various columns/rows
		  simultaneously, select the columns and then change
		  the dimension of one of them.  

	- To edit the contents of a cell that already has a value,
	  press F2 key.

	- When typing a formula, you can use the cursor keys to select
	  a cell or a cell range in the expression.  This will only
	  work if a cell name is valid at the cursor point.

	  To specify a cell range, just move to the start of the cell
	  range and then hold down the shift key while making the size
	  of the selection cursor bigger.

	- An expression is evaluated constantly on top of the current
	  selection.  There is a number of pre-defined auto-compute
	  expressions, you can change this by right clicking on this
	  expression (it is on the bottom right corner)

	- If you drag a selection with button 3 instead of button one
	  there is no default action, rather, a menu pops up with 
	  a list of possibel options on actions to perform.

	- Gnumeric distinguishes regular text from formulas by preceding
	  formulas with an equal sign.  So to enter an expression you have	
	  to enter for example: =1+2.

	- Control-Space selects a column

	- Control-A selects all

	- SHift-Space selects the row.

	- Selection-keys + control extend the selection to boundary of
	  worksheet.

	- SHift-Backspace:  Collapses selection to active cell.

	- Home: move to the beginning of the row.
	
	- Contorl-Home: move to the cell A1

     o Auto-convert-on-input features: When you enter text in Gnumeric
       it is now matched against the known formats of Gnumeric and if
       possible, converted to a (number, format) pair.  This works
       when you enter a formula and when you type in text.

       This means you can use now dates and times in expressions, like
       this: ="10-Jan"+45.  

       Autofill will also work on this.