Thanks for the answer to my question about Calc - this did the trick
In answer to Steve's question about why I should want to do this, I
think it was partly answered but the specific cases I wanted it for
were:
1. I'd got some invoices to do and in many cases the only change
from last year was replace some line items with
=ROUND(last_years_price * (1 + inflation_rate);2) The trouble is
I did that last year and the formula started to look ridiculous,
besides which "inflation_rate" was different. I suppose I could
have done it by making "inflation_rate" some cumulative value
but it seemed easiest to start from plain numbers. Or I could
have had last year's invoice on one worksheet with a reference
to the line item for that in another worksheet.
2. I had to make some "high-level" adjustments to our accounts for
end of year audit and in some cases I had to move sums between
the debit and credit column, so for example row A had X
subtracted from the debit column row B had Y added to the debit
column and row C had X-Y subtracted from the credit column. I
wanted the values to be the correct final values not a whole
string of corrections especially as the formulae involved plain
numbers and no cell references.
3. Same task - we have most accounts in GBP, some in USD and some
in Euro. When conversions have been done at certain points of
the year, the rate that applied on that day rather than the rate
at the end end of the year had to be used.
In all cases the easiest thing seemed to me to be to just replace the
column with the numeric value once I was happy it was right. I could
have probably done it by having a considerably more complicated
spreadsheet in each case but it seemed pointless in the circumstances.
John Collins Xi Software Ltd www.xisl.com
