Dear LyX developers & users,
Now that LyX 2.0 is about to be launched perhaps it is a good time to
mention the missing element in the 'LyX office suite'. At present LyX
provides the wordprocessor & mathematics editor, beamer (presumably)
covers the slide show/presentation side of things, and I understand from
keeping an eye on the developers' list that biblatex is being worked on.
Biblatex is more than just a bibliography engine -- it lends itself to
handling more general databases, which is how I've used it (a large
database of people). Thus the obvious missing element from the 'LyX
office suite' is a spreadsheet facility. At present one can't even sum a
column of figures in a table.
I've recently discovered the latex spreadtab package which provides
limited but useful spreadsheet facilities. It is being actively
developed. The spreadtab manual shows a good range of applications, and
I've created a timesheet with this package in which you enter date,
start & end times and spreadtab then calculates time worked, the total
hours worked over all entries, and the daily hours worked, and compiles
to a nice pdf.
Even now, LyX's table button and toolbar is helpful for building a
spreadtab table. Having tried both, I found it much easier to do this in
LyX than in a text editor. In a LyX table one has the ability to insert
or delete rows or columns and not have to fuss over all those ampersands
and keeping them in sync with the formatting header if you want to add
or delete columns, which is messy if there are wide formulas in some
columns and not others. When the table has been filled with spreadtab
commands and data, open the source view window in LyX, copy the table
code, and paste it into an ERT inset. Insert line breaks, find & replace
items like '\textbackslash' with '\', '\{' with '{', '\}' with '}',
'\tabularnewline' with '\\' and adjust the table header if there are
hidden columns.
At present, inserting an empty (say) 2 by 3 table in LyX & viewing the
source code shows:
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|}
\hline
& & \tabularnewline
\hline
\hline
& & \tabularnewline
\hline
\end{tabular}
The spreadtab package with the same latticework of lines requires:
\begin{spreadtab}{{tabular}{|c|c|c|}}
\hline
& & \\
\hline
\hline
& & \\
\hline
\end{spreadtab}
In my ignorance, these don't look too different. It would be nice to
have a button on the table toolbar which would convert the former into
the latter, and even better if it would do the find-&-replaces referred
to earlier, or something equivalent.
The spreadtab manual describes its mode of working: first it reads the
body of the table, then it computes the formulas in the cells, then it
rebuilds the table replacing formulas with calculated values. The final
result is a latex table which only then gets compiled as such.
The current lack of even a basic 'active' table in LyX, where you can
sum a column of figures for instance, seems an obvious missing element
in the LyXian scheme of things. Spreadtab could fill that gap.
Andrew Parsloe
