Hi Brian
I'm sorry about the problems you've had, and I'm glad (for you and the
students) that you discovered the lower marks before it was too late.
You seem to be making three main points, that I'd like to comment on.
1. SOME CALC FUNCTIONS DIFFER FROM EXCEL FUNCTIONS
MIN under Excel considers blank cells to contain zero data, but
MIN under oocalc ignores blank cells.
While many of the fuctions work the same way in both programs, there are
functions and notation that do differ.
While I wouldn't like OpenOffice.org to be limited to copying Microsoft's
functions, I think you are making a good point. If you have an Excel
spreadsheet that works fine in Excel, and you import it into Calc, you
would normally assume that the formulas would give the same answers.
Either the import process should convert the formulas to the equivalent
Calc formulas, or a warning should be given that some formulas in the
spreadsheet may give different answers to Excel.
Sometimes there is only a slight difference between the formulas, and the
answers would usually (but not always) be the same. It may be difficult to
determine just how to convert each formula into Calc. In this case,
changing MIN to MINA would have been appropriate, but would it always be
appropriate in every spreadsheet? That is hard to know.
I'm sure this has been discussed before. Does anyone have some further
insight?
2. THIS INCOMPATIBILITY WILL DISCOURAGE MIGRATION
I have made several attempts to get people to convert from Windows to
Linux, but issues like this one in which just moving a grading
spreadsheet might cause students to end up with incorrect grades, are
real deal breakers.
I disagree with this point - as long as the people considering migration
understand the issues. There is always a cost in migration, and usually a
big part of that cost is learning to do things a new way.
I don't know how many different spreadsheet programs I've used since the
DOS days. It's probably somewhere between 10 and 20. All of them deal with
many functions in different ways.
Same goes for word processing. I used to know every function key
combination for WordPerfect 5.1, and it hasn't helped me one bit in any
word processing program. They all have different features, key
combinations and menu structures.
But that's the great thing about OpenOffice.org. It's cross platform. Get
to know it in Windows, and you can use it in Linux. Possibly that's a
starting point when talking to your friends - get them to consider
changing to OpenOffice.org and Firefox, and talk about Linux when they've
made that change.
In fact, if you'd created your spreadsheet in OpenOffice.org for Windows,
you wouldn't have had a problem using it in Linux.
In case I wasn't clear, my point is that once people migrate to
OpenOffice.org, they will be making Calc spreadsheets with Calc formulas,
not Excel spreadsheets with Excel formulas. This situation won't happen
(except for possibly temporarily during the migration).
3. EXCEL'S USE OF THE MIN FUNCTION IS SUPERIOR
IMHO, in this case Excel does it right and oocalc does it wrong.
I appreciate the IMHO, and understand everyone's preferences are different.
I don't have a strong preference here, as long as I know how the function
will work.
But I did do a quick search in Google, and found quite a few faq's and
tutorials explaining how to get around the way Excel does MIN. It seems
that a lot of people get a minimum value of 0 when they weren't expecting
it. A blank cell somewhere was mucking up their expectation of the results.
But everyone's different.
Thanks for your honest email, Brian. I think you're main point was number
1, and I think it's fairly valid.
Does anyone have suggestions of a helpful way forward?
Adrian
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