Lots of progress recently. Almer has landed the core changes for conditional formats & validation. Morten and I have been doing some optimization of the dependency code. 0.71 is shaping up to be a greased weasel release. In addtion, several new contributors have donated nifty extensions. This includes printing support for patterns, and an xml schema. Graphs are progressing on the guppi side most of the old framework has been converted to the new xml and we should be able to freeze the gnumeric side shortly.
A small rant MS file formats are poorly documented and somewhat obfuscated. In preparing to import conditional formats from MS Excel it has become clear that they are using a wholly new kludge to specify the portions of format that are legal.