To comment on the following update, log in, then open the issue: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=83219 Issue #|83219 Summary|Complex LHS for formulae Component|Spreadsheet Version|OOo 2.2.1 Platform|All URL| OS/Version|All Status|UNCONFIRMED Status whiteboard| Keywords| Resolution| Issue type|ENHANCEMENT Priority|P5 Subcomponent|editing Assigned to|spreadsheet Reported by|gnor
------- Additional comments from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Nov 1 19:46:11 +0000 2007 ------- Dear Members! Aye, everybody is used to the old Visicalc scheme of selecting a single cell, tapping "=", and entering the formula, selecting the various cells for the RHS' variables and typing operators between them. For repetitious calculations, you selected the cell, copied it, and pasted it down or across a region, allowing or disallowing auto-computation of cell addresses. This carried over to Lotus 1-2-3, MS-Excel, OOo, the latter two with that magic lower right corner, and any of the other exotic spreadsheets like GNUmeric. When the NeXT Cube was put into life, Lotus augmented the spreadsheet idea by adding a complex LHS to the formulae. You selected a whole region, preferrably a whole column or row, tapped "=" again and entered regions of the same dimension between the operators. In addition, the column and row headers didn't show the traditional "A, B, C, ..." and "1, 2, 3, ..." labels, but you were encouraged to edit them and change the auto-generated meaningless labels to something meaningful, as is entered into the first row and column of a traditional spreadsheet. Thus the regions both on the LHS and RHS of the formulae became "speaking". In addition, there was a multi-dimensionality feature not found in traditional spreadsheets, where the "third" dimension is a number of single sheets in a model, in this NeXT spreadsheet named "Improv", there were four "sub-dimensions" for each of the three top-level "dimensions", the third being somewhat hidden, resulting in twelve "dimensions" total. You could rearrange these sub-dimensions quite liberally, even pulling them from one top-level dimension to another, provided there would no more than four sub-dimensions on each face of the "cube". Lotus ported this then from the NeXT to Windows 3.x and sold it for DEM 200.-- in the early 90's. It continued to work even under OS/2, but the fourth disk had gone broke when it was time to install it under NT4. It is highly likely that it will have stopped working like Borland dBase V when the Win16 subsystem was "cleaned" up in W2k, this was not fixed under XP and Vista won't either, there dBase IV will miss it's DOS-box. Improv is absolutely abandoned by Lotus since quite a time, but the scheme has somewhat resurrected in Quantrix which costs a multitude than Improv. The third dimension of Improv has changed to a filter dimension, otherwise it is quite similar to Improv. I don't know whether Lotus has patented this, the multi-dimensionality isn't needed too much, but the "speaking" row and column headers will be, and the complex LHS in the formulae using those "speaking" addresses as well. Please look out for any patent infringements. But this will allow users better debuggable models, which easily can be converted to the traditional copy-across/down schem for traditional formats, the contrary is non-trivial, but not impossible. This would give OOo users an edge over the ubiquitous spreadsheet. Kind regards Norbert Grün --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]
