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------- Additional comments from [email protected] Sun May 24 14:02:35 +0000 2009 ------- Hi alcohenma, I have never, and would never, enforce a "I think this is better for you" policy. I am simply putting forward an alternative to Excel. Excel has already proved to be the winner, but, in my opinion, through top notch marketing and (allegedly) underhand practices. Again in my opinion, it was never the best. Your really cannot use the term "wrong mathematical results" when referring to performing a mathematical calculation on a cell which has been deliberately entered as a "text item". It is true that the result will be different, but by no stretch of the imagination can it be "wrong". Imagine your bank balance if you add in the Account Number to the total. Pay off your insurance premium, but don't add in the Policy Number before you pay it. As to "impossible to catch", check out the facilities in Openoffice for Value Highlighting and Mark Invalid Data. Hi kkeane, I think that we actually have all of this; OpenOffice with the "improvements" and reading tolerably well Excel files. Go-oo without the "improvements", also reading Excel files to a reasonable extent, and Excel. To restate my point: 1) I do not want formulae to fail because there is a text string in one of the dependant cells (OpenOffice 1 Excel 0) 2) I do not want my bank account number added into a column of figures, even if I have (correctly) formatted it as text. (OpenOffice 2 Excel 1) Yes, Excel does not work the way you want with the SUM() formula! so: 3) I do want the result of calculations to be consistent, whichever formula I choose to use. In an example spreadsheet OpenOffice got the answer the same in 8 cases, 2 resulted in ERR:502 and 2 were different. The same sheet in Excel produced the same result in 6 cases, 4 resulted in #VALUE and again 2 were different. The example was worked using simple SUM(), +A1+A2 and VLOOKUP() formulae on a range of cells, including the most common user input errors. On a more complex calculation including a VLOOKUP() formula which returns a blank cell if no entry is found, Excel refused to give an answer for both SUM(+A1,-A2...) and +A1-A2... whereas OpenOffice gave the "correct" answer in both cases. Moving on to a previous point, can you explain why Excel included a Transition Formula Evaluation option if it is never needed? Personally I thought the latter was a good option. Add an option which allows the user to treat text as numbers wherever possible. The suggestion was rubbished by the developers when I posted it. One final thought, how do users input numbers into a spreadsheet, format them as text, and then align them right without realising it? Ah well. Andrew --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]
