Re: [office] Proposal for basis (YEARFRAC etc.)

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

David A. Wheeler wrote:
> > I propose that basis values be assigned like this:
> > 0..4 : Excel 2007 as they ACTUALLY ARE.  This enables easy transition.
> > 5..31: reserved (future Excel)
> > 32..36: OOXML spec'ed basis algorithms. ...
> > This way, if someone is reading in an actual OOXML file (as opposed to a file
> > written by Microsoft Office 2007), they could trivially translate it by
> > adding/subtracting offsets.  Since no one uses OOXML at this time,
> > and it's not clear that they will, I think that's a reasonable approach.

Eike Rathke:
> This doesn't work, as you can't distinguish between document versions
> once the file was saved to a different document format, including ODF.

My theory was that an importer/exporter to a DIFFERENT format would do this,
by inserting a constant addition/subtraction whenever writing a function with a basis value.

IE, if you wrote to Excel 2007's .xls, or to .xlsx for Excel, you'd do nothing because
that's ALREADY what it does.

IE, if you wrote to "ISO-spec OXML", then:
YEARFRAC(...;...;5)
would be written as:
YEARFRAC(...;...;5+32)
or more likely that would be optimized to:
YEARFRAC(...;...;37)


The fact that ISO OXML and Microsoft Office are fundamentally incompatible
are a fact of life, and not something this committee can fix.  All we can do is
to make it relatively easy to handle, if someone wants to.

--- David A. Wheeler