Re: [office-comment] Re: Very Weak String Support in ODF

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi Leonard,

On Saturday, 2007-06-09 12:12:28 +0300, Leonard Mada wrote:

> One thing in common that every study on human errors has brought to 
> light is that errors increase as formulas get more complex. The 
> workaround for the FIND/SEARCH()-problem makes the formula definitely 
> more complex, what do you think?
>  1.)     = OR( FIND("a"; ...) ; FIND("b"; ...) )
>  2.)     = OR( IF( ISERR( FIND("a"; A1) );  0 ; FIND("a"; A1) ) ; IF( 
> ISERR( FIND("b"; A1)) ;  0 ; FIND("b"; A1) ) )
> 
> Please feel free to correct the above formula IF you find the error. I 
> was NOT able to make OOo Calc compute it. After more that 15  minutes I 
> gave up.

Actually I didn't experience any problem with #2, it works exactly like
you wrote it, giving TRUE if A1 contains "a" or "b", else FALSE.
However, of course compared to #1 it is overly complex. That is where
IFNA comes in, what we currently discuss on the subcommittee's list.

= OR( IFNA( FIND("a"; A1); 0) ; IFNA( FIND("b"; A1); 0) )

  Eike

-- 
 OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS