Interesting... I'm continuing the effort to revive my electronic bookkeeping abilities, but without spending any money. Excel is the tough one. I need to be able to read my old spreadsheet data, generate new data, and print monthly summaries. A search of the web finds Sun's Star Office which I know has that capability. But Star Office now costs money ($59). It was free a couple years ago, but it really sucked a couple of years ago. It sorta' worked sometimes, but crashed often and mangled system settings. Not sure I want to pay to find out if it has improved.

Then I surf over to the GNU site - the original home of free software. I could tell you what GNU stands for but it gets lost in translation. They've got a product called 'gnumeric' which claims to do it all. Best of all, it's free. So I download it and run it through the ropes. Yeah, it pretty much works for reading and writing Excel files. But it won't print. Pages come up blank. I notice in the release notes that Windows support is only a month or two old, and lots of hits on the web if you look for 'gnumeric printing bugs'. It isn't quite ready for prime time. Close, but no cigar.

Then a random search for 'reads Excel files' leads me to none other than microsoft.com, where they have a free download called 'xlviewer' - which reads and prints Excel files (but won't let you make changes to them). I gave it a try. Yup, it prints nicely. Reads my old data. But then how to generate new data?

Then it dawns on me that I've got the answer right in front of me. Gnumeric creates Excel spreadsheets, but won't print 'em. Xlviewer reads and prints Excel spreadsheets but won't let you create them. Bingo! Put the two together and it's a winning formula. Not terribly convenient, but it does what I need to do. I only print spreadsheets on the first day of the month. So it's not like it's horribly inconvenient.