Tables vs. spreadsheets

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings!

I suppose because I don't want to have to do change tracking more than 
once or at least only have to extend what we develop, I am curious what 
is the perceived difference between tables and spreadsheets?

I thought about it early this morning and reasoned that the cells in a 
table change one by one, whereas in a spreadsheet, I may have a formula, 
the changing of which changes values in many cells.

OK, but then I thought, how is the spreadsheet example different from a 
global save and replace where I have lots of tables and cells in each 
table are changed in the save and replace?

True, not a formula change but it is still a change that is performed by 
the application across a potentially large number of locations in a 
document.

Or is the problem how do you capture changes to the formula? That is 
while I am changing "+" to "/" does that populate tracked changes in all 
the cells? Well, don't do dumb things while you have change tracking on. 
;-) Or, make change tracking in calculated cell values the result of 
applying formulas.

Surely we know which cells are the results of calculations. Data entry 
cells are treated as that. Capture changes in calculated cells by 
capturing the formulas applied to calculated cells.

I am sure there are several very large holes in that analysis so would 
appreciate your comments/suggestions.

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

--
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)
OASIS Technical Advisory Board (TAB) - member

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