I am not quite sure how to suggest a change to Getting Started with Calc as it is a published chapter and I would like some comments on my proposed wording. Therefore I am posting it here and also providing a PDF file at http://www.mytempdir.com/322536 since my attempt to send it as a formated html message was a fiasco
I hope that I have not been too harsh in my wording but I do consider this to be a potentially very serious problem. Proposed addition to Getting Started with Calc (pg. 22) Section Entering Numbers as text. Explicitly declaring a variable as text does not mean that you cannot perform arithmetic operations on it. It just means that the results will be wrong. In some cases Calc will perform arithmetic operations on a cell that contains text whether it is a character string, for example ABCD, or a numeric string the you have formatted explicitly as a text cell.For an example you might have a postal code 01234 as B2 that you entered in a text-formated cell as '01234, and a number 5 as B3 (Entering a number preceded by an apostrophe is one way to make a number a text value rather than a numeric.) If you enter 5 * '01234 in B6 you will see the text 5 * '01234 as you would expect. However if you enter B2 * B3 in cell B6 you get the result 0. If you enter values in cells as numbers and later format those cells to text, the numbers remain numbers. Thus for example if you entered 1234 in cell B2 and then formatted it as a text cell you would find that B2*B3 = 6170 If the cells are not otherwise formatted you can see this when the numbers remain right aligned rather than becoming left aligned as one would expect text to do. This table shows the results of some illegal arithmetic operations A1 = 5 B1 = FOO C1='999 D1 = Harry Operation Result Add (A1 + B1 5 Subtract (B5-A5) -5 Multiply A1*B1 0 Add A1 + C1 5 Multiply A1+C1 0 Multiply (A5*B5*C5) 0 Add (B1 + D1) 0 This type of behaviour is not limited to Calc, Similar things can be found in other major spreadsheets. One needs to careful. ----- John Kane Kingston ON Canada [EMAIL PROTECTED] (613)888-2399 -- http://www.fastmail.fm - The way an email service should be
