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------- Additional comments from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Dec 6 12:44:33 -0800 2005 ------- @rainerbielefeld Re: “That all is a question of philosophy.” It is not a question of philosophy unless we are referring to something like Principia Mathematica. Calc (and Excel) perform illegal mathematical operations in a way that may be completely undetectable to the user. This issue first came to my attention in the OOo Calc forum where someone was having a problem with data that his company was receiving in Excel from their suppliers (Issue 5658 clearly). However it soon became apparent that there was more of a problem, both with Calc and with Excel. My advice to the poster, now,would be to go back to the suppliers and verify the information that they are receiving. Given that the Excel spread sheets are badly set up they cannot trust the suppliers' information. To me, the first requirement for user-friendliness is that that the spread sheet does not lie to me. Here, I can carry out an illegal operation and, instead of an error message, I get what may be a plausible result. The fact that Excel makes the same type of errors is not exactly an excuse for Calc doing the same. Excel errors and Calc errors are just different enough that they are likely to compound the problem since if I am aware of the Calc errors and watch out for them in Excel then the Excel errors may slip by me or vis versa. The question, also, is not “does OOo behaviour really cause more real problems than incompatibility to Excel.” The incompatibility already exists as Issue 5658 shows. Both spreadsheets do illegal operations, they just do them differently. The real question is, “Do we want to have a a spreadsheet that we know is faulty, where the faults may be very serious and potentially life threatening. Spreadsheets are used in many areas including scientific research , financial modelling and engineering. A quick google for Excel and these keywords brought up a number of instances. Here are two for illustration.http://finance.wharton.upenn.edu/~benninga/pfe.html http://www.decisioneering.com/engineering/ A user/builder of large and complex spreadsheets who are most at risk since they will have the knowledge to design spreadsheets with string and numeric data properly formatted as a means to reduce the chance of error. They may accidentally do something like use a postal code of the form 1234 as a numeric value in a model by using the wrong column of data or perhaps the wrong data-range name in a formula. These errors can have very seriou with serious real world consequences. Worse in a way, they will be less likely to suspect an error since they “know” that you cannot multiply a postal code by a number since they have carefully formatted it as a character string. And the Calc Help clearly states this. I don't like the thought that an Airbus aircraft engineer or perhaps my government's finance department may be making decisions on bad information. Nor do I want my pharmacist or doctor calculating a drug dosage for me based on my street number rather than my weight. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please do not reply to this automatically generated notification from Issue Tracker. Please log onto the website and enter your comments. http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html#notification --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
