GNU Oleo

 ( Discontinued Software ) 

By 1995, sc had acquired an X Window front-end called xspread, which added graphics capabilities. In 1998, Oleo acquired a Motif-like GUI, relying on the royalty-free LessTif widget set. A GTK 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 or . 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. Graphics are drawn using the device-independent library libplot, the centerpiece of the GNU plotutils. Oleo offers spreadsheet access to the GNU Scientific Library, a large collection of mathematical functions. It also offers some database connectivity, allowing access to MySQL database via queries, Xbase and dBase file access. It has support for macro programming, and for printing purposes it supports ASCII and PostScript output. Still, by 2000 it could not import Excel spreadsheets, while newer open source alternatives like Gnumeric offered this feature, and could also import Oleo spreadsheets.

Oleo was still recommended as a console spreadsheet application in a 2005 article in Linux.com, 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 or multiple terminals can be used as a work-around. Oleo supports editing the same spreadsheet in concurrent application instances.

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