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Subject: Re: [office-comment] Re: Unit system tracking
Hey David, On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 14:13 -0400, David A. Wheeler wrote: > We discussed adding units of measure at today's OpenDocument > teleconference. Certainly, automated tracking/conversion of units of > measure can be very valuable. > > But I think most people view this capability as out-of-scope for this > round. The formula charter specifically says in point 6: "It must be > friendly to conversions from and to existing office application > spreadsheet formula languages." Trying to add full automated > conversions is a MAJOR change that would permeate any formula > language. Even +,-,*,/, and ^ would have to be modified to track > units, and every value would now be a tuple of (value, units). I think that's a bit of a hostage to fortune: essentially, we're talking about typed data (in CS-speak), and if the other side isn't typed then automated conversion into the typed format is obviously impossible. But, I don't see why you'd attempt that - e.g., ODF doesn't ask people to up-convert tables into page columns when they're used for layout. The typed stuff is extra mojo on top. While it doesn't aid conversion, I don't see that it hampers it. I probably mostly agree with the end decision, but I think this should be kept on the radar. Stuff like <number:currency-style> seems to me a horrible mishmash of presentation and meta-data, and this type of proposal could sort this out (i.e., separate the "this data is currency in USD" from the "format USD values in blue with a $ on the front"). If correctly used (ha ha ha!), this would also be a significant user convenience, I can think of two big use cases: * detection of user error - e.g., "time multiplied by time makes no sense!" * being able to get away from formulas to do conversions - e.g., no more "(A1/12) is the rental value per month", so when A1 changes from being an annual value to a six-monthly value, the calculation still works Cheers, Alex.
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