Arnold Huzen wrote:
> Walter Hildebrandt schreef:
>> ... Since the difference between a colon and a semi-colon can
>> be very confusing, I think this is a weakness of OOo.
...
It's not a weakness of OOo, but a means of getting things done. Even
Excel uses this technique to make complex formulas. You just have to
learn and understand why this is happening. ...
Your reply doesn't speak to Walter's point: having some kind of syntax
for these concepts is inescapable, but there are better and worse
choices for what syntax to use. OOo's choice of a semicolon as a list
separator is about as bad as you can get: it's different than Excel and
every other expression syntax that I can think of, all of which use a
comma for this purpose. On top of that, the shape of the semicolon is
very similar to the comma, especially in the thin UI fonts used by Calc,
making it hard to visually distinguish from colons in a formula.
I believe OOo is following Lotus 123 here, but wherever the idea came
from, we're likely stuck with it forever now.
One way to help alleviate this is to use spaces in your formulas.
Another practice that can greatly improve readability is to use named
cells for common variables. This may slow things down a bit, I haven't
checked.
E.g., which of these is easier to understand?
=SUM($A$2:$A$14;$A$1*5;$B$2:$B$14;$B$1*3;1/($B$1+$A$1))
=SUM($A$2:$A$14; $A$1*5; $B$2:$B$14; $B$1*3; 1/($B$1+$A$1))
=SUM(AParts; AQty*5; BParts; BQty*3; 1/(BQty+AQty))
<Joe
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