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Subject: Namespaces for Sheets
Dear TC members, I would like to extend the proposal for "Storing sheet-local named expressions in ODF", see: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200608/msg00001.html and http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200611/msg00085.html David Wheeler's proposal contains many important reasons, why expressions local to a sheet are important. Similarly, I propose to extend this concept in the form of "C++"-type namespaces for named ranges. Complex spreadsheets are very error prone. Using named-ranges structures the spreadsheet somewhat. Unfortunately, names become messy when one has to use more than a dozen, greatly limiting the usefulness of names. Additionally, in most programs, the names that are defined in any sheet are mixed together in a single list. This leads easily to misidentifying names and generates a lot of errors (and also makes searching for an error or 'correcting a range'/'editing a name' more complex than it should be). Limiting name-scope to a spreadsheet (for explicitly locally declared names) would greatly simplify working with complex spreadsheets. Many named-ranges from different sheets contain actually identical data, so that identical names are warranted. More complex names (containing sheet-identifiers) are ugly and also easily generate errors (when copying cells from one sheet to the next). It should be possible to limit names for local-use or declare them (explicitly) as global. Local names could be used in other sheets through <namespace/aka sheet-name>!'name', while globally declared names would be accessed within all sheets of the spreadsheet simply by their name (aka 'name'). Also, the names would be grouped per sheet (in the dialog displaying the named-ranges), so that one can easily find what names were declared in which sheet. *Namespaces* are one of the most important improvements of C++ over C, and considering that spreadsheets are actually the most widely used programming environment, it seems very strange that such an important concept does not get addressed. I have filed last year this same proposal as a feature request on the OOo-site, see: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=66886 for a more extensive discussion of this issue. I hope that the spreadsheet application and the respective ODF-specification begin implementing programmer-proven mechanisms to reduce error rates, namespaces being one of the many possible improvements (strong typing being another one, as I already posted in a previous message). Many thanks, Leonard Mada
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