Looking for Objective-C Spreadsheet Control

Question

The company I work for has a Window application that includes integrated word processing and spreadsheet components. We use TextControl and FarPoint for the implementation. We have been developing an OS X counterpart for this application. The word processing functionality is actually pretty easy--the standard multi-line text view makes a very credible word processor. However the spreadsheet is a rather significant challenge. While there are open-source spreadsheet projects (gnumeric, kspread, OpenOffice, etc.) none of them use the native Cocoa look-and-feel, nor do they expose the spreadsheet as a component that can be embedded into an NSView.

So here's my question: Does anyone know of a spreadsheet component for OS X? It doesn't matter if it's OSS or closed-source, as long as it works. We need all of the basic functionality of Excel except for macros. Graphing would be nice, but not mandatory. Something similar to the solver would also be beneficial.

Answer 1

Take a look at NSTableView.

Answer 2

A while ago I tried to get an NSTableView to behave like a spreadsheet in terms of user interaction. Matt Ball (whose website is currently down) has an open source spreadsheet control called MBTableGrid. The last time I looked at it, it offered very Cocoa-like implementation of a spreadsheet control.

Answer 3

For the UI, you should look at NSMatrix which is basically a class for displaying information in grids.

As for the computation, Since you can easily combine any standard C or C++ with Objective-C, I would look for a generic C, C++ library. One of the open source projects must provide such code. Tying that into a NSMatrix would be relatively trivial.

Still, I don't think your going to find a free or cheap drag and drop full feature spreadsheet. If someone wrote that, they might as well just release the spreadsheet themselves.