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http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5658
------- Additional comments from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Mar 5 16:02:43 +0000
2008 -------
@er: Good point. I hope that everyone is following this debate, it cuts to the
very heart of why Excel and OOo behave differently and I am delighted to finally
understand why it works this way. I just created an Excel spreadsheet with
French locale settings, and entered '1,000 into cell A1, and then =A1+1 into A2,
and it calculates the result as 2. I saved, closed, changed my Windows settings
to English, re-open the spreadsheet, and it still says 2. If I edit the cell and
just press Enter without changing the formula, it recalculates it to being
1,001. Doing the same in OOo with VALUE() calls around the cell reference
behaves a little differently, it re-calculates using the current locale when you
open the spreadsheet.
One way to handle this would be to store locale information with every text
value. So when a French person enters "1,000" into a spreadsheet, it is stored
internally as, say, "{France}1,000" which is to be interpreted as 1 in a
numerical context and maybe even displayed as "1.000" (or displayed as 1,000
with a warning indicator) when an English person opens it. This would require
standardisation of the NLS formats so that all platforms can interpret {France}
equivalently. Of course this is a huge change to make with a lot of impact so it
may be too late to do things this way in OOo, even if it did turn out to solve
this issue, and I fully expect that good reasons not to do it this way will
surface.
Of course, it's perfectly possible to construct spreadsheets in OOo that suffer
from exactly the same locale ambiguity, using the VALUE() function. I guess if
you go down that path, though, you take responsibility for text-to-number
conversions, whereas making it automatic could cause ambiguity that the user
does not expect.
I still think that the issue should be addressed, though, and OOo should behave
as though an implicit VALUE() call were wrapped around the cell reference, using
the current locale to interpret text values as numbers. Anyone dealing with text
entered in multiple locales should handle that themselves as a people process
issue.
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