Comments on undefined formulas plan for this week... and a THA

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

Here are some useful comments about the undefined functions, from one of our subcommittee members.  It was sent only to me, and not to our mailing list, but clearly this info is useful to all of us... so I'm guessing the sender wanted these comments anonymized.

--- David A. Wheeler

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> CELL
This function is a nightmare. For example in Excel & Gnumeric
=cell("format",A1) returns G if A1 is still in General format, whatever
that means. In other words it exposes internal format descriptors.

> CURRENT (tricky semantics)
I am not quite sure what this is really supposed to do but if it gives
the current selection (just a guess) then this is a problem for any
application providing multiple views on the same spreadsheet since the
current selection could be view specific. 

> GETPIVOTDATA
> LOOKUP
> FREQUENCY
> GROWTH
If "GROWTH function applies the ``least squares'' method to fit an
exponential curve to your data and predicts the exponential growth by
using this curve. GROWTH returns an array having one column and a row
for each data point in @new_x." is really correct then that shouldn't be
to tricky.

> HYPGEOMVERT
Is this hypgeomdist, but in german? I am pretty sure the german and
english answers ought to be the same.

> BAHTTEXT (should probably remove)
It really doesn't make sense to have a function to translate a number
into a textual number followed by the name for the Thai currency in
Thai. It would make more sense to have a function that returns a textual
number in the locale language.

> ASC
In MS Excel (tm) ASC converts 2 byte string into single byte text. We
may need to support that function for compatibility but without
specifying storage format for strings I don't see how we could define
this reasonably.