John Kane wrote:
On Fri, 30 Dec 2005 21:09:10 -0600, "Peter Kupfer OOo"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
John Kane wrote:
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 didn't follow the whole conversation closely, but do we know that the
behavior is as expected, or should an error be filed first?
As far as I am concerned it is clearly an error and potentially a very
serious one but then I am the one who brought it up. I have reported it
as Issue #: 58903 . It does not seem to be getting a lot of attention.
This may be because Excell and Quatro Pro are just as guilty of this
type of behaviour.
Below is an excerpt from the Calc Help: (this is almost the same as the
text in the OOoAuthors' Getting Started with Calc chapter.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You can format numbers as text in OpenOffice.org Calc. Open the context
menu of a cell or range of cells and choose Format Cells - Numbers, then
select "Text" from the Category list. Any numbers subsequently entered
into the formatted range are interpreted as text. The display of these
"numbers" is left-justified, just as with other text.
TIP When numbers are formatted as text, they cannot be used in
calculations or formulas.
operations will not work on it. It will either be ignored or will
produce an error of some kind.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unfortunately this is not true. Some mathematical operations on a text
or string value will return an incorrect number with no warning. As a
simple example type cat into cell A1 and dog into B1
Let C1 = A1* B1. C1 = 0. Or if A1 is 5 and B1 is fud then if C1 =
A1 + B1 then C1=5.
Somehow I have a problem believing that cat + dog = 0.
You can see my calculations at http://www.mytempdir.com/360489
-----
John Kane
Kingston ON Canada
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(613)888-2399
Cat + dog = 0 may not make much sense. But 3 + 2 + equivalent + missing
+ 6 = 11 makes perfect sense in some contexts. Treating a number as text
and giving it a value of 0 for calculation purposes is risky. A program
can test for content which is strictly numeric, and it's safe to assume
that those text numbers should be included in calculations in most
cases. But what about part numbers, serial numbers and such? Certainly
don't want those included in the count.
This "bug" isn't as straightforward as it might appear.
