Re: [office-formula] SUMIF, COUNTIF, COUNTBLANK, DCOUNT, DSUM,... with empty cells and "" and ="" e

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

Eike Rathke said:
> There is some inconsistency in how applications handle empty cells in
> various conditional functions, and also Excel in itself isn't
> consistent. This is somewhat a big mess, but I also have no concrete
> idea whether we should do better or for interoperability's sake mimic
> the Excel behavior, which might be preferred, and also Gnumeric does.
> Please see also http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=65221
> where a testcase document with some explanations is attached.

As I see it, we have at least two basic options:
1. Mandate a very specific behavior.
  A. Make it consistent with Gnumeric & Excel, even though it's completely
      self-inconsistent.  If we could identify a consistency, that'd be good!
  B. Make a self-consistent behavior, but not consistent with current practice.
      I think this is a bad idea.
2. Allow more variance (e.g., don't mandate a particular approach).
   In this case, I think we should document the differences as "Note:"s,
   so we can discuss them (and convert them into requirements later if desired).

My inclination is to start with #2, so that at least it's all documented somewhere
accessible.  It'll then be easier then to switch to 1A, if it's desired.

The risk of #1 is that if we mandate too much, we may require a lot of
self-inconsistency that we'll regret.  The risk of #2 is that users can't depend on
certain odd behavior in all apps, but it's not clear that users actually depend on
this one.

I can easily be talked into something different.  Anyone have any more
thoughts on this?

--- David A. Wheeler