Suggestion: OpenOffice + Octave

[Mike]

Dear Gnu,

Could you combine the open-office spreadsheet application with the octave
language you created?

Excel is a very common, somewhat powerful engineering tool.  Ive seen it
used as one for years.
It has some hang-ups, and some downright poor areas:
It is weak for matrix-math.
It is generalized to appeal to many fields (good) but that keeps it from
being excellent.
Its back-end programming language is VBA, not Fortran, or Matlab
Limited graphing... very static.


MatLab is a very expensive, very powerful engineering tool.  Ive seen it
used for years.
Very simple language.
Very powerful.
Matrix-rich language.
more powerful graphing customization

Imagine the power of a spreadsheet (openoffice) frontend with an sci-math
(octave/fortran) backend!
Excel is matrix-math weak!
Fortran has been being developed for decades to be math-powerful!


You can make an open-source engineering tool out of code you already have
that would be more useful to engineers and engineering students alike in
ways that redmond cant.  Thats what gnu does.  Im a first year engineering
student and I just dont have the kind of programming background to do that..
otherwise I already would have.

I thought I might ask you to do that, so um... what do you think?

-mike