RE: [office-collab] CT and Spreadsheet tables

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

My impression is that the RiCj notation as currently used is subject to exactly the same sort of rewriting when the formula moves (relativistically speaking), with $ and additional rules determining how things work when entire (blocks of) rows and columns are inserted, deleted or moved.

It seems that the advantage of RiCj is that the forms can be synthesized more easily in deriving references from indexes of cells, rows, and columns.  Of course, one also needs a way to prevent ambiguity with the existing letters-digits form in the case that the row or the column part is omitted, since Ri and Cj alone are problematic.

-----Original Message-----
From: robert_weir@us.ibm.com [mailto:robert_weir@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 05:51
To: Michael Brauer
Cc: office-collab@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office-collab] CT and Spreadsheet tables

Michael Brauer <michael.brauer@oracle.com> wrote on 04/08/2011 01:54:33
AM:

> 
> If you insert a row or column into a speadsheet, office applications 
> update the formulas in the cells so that they still refer to the 
> original ones. For instance, if you have a formula referencing B1 and 
> insert a column as first column, then that reference becomes C1 
> because columns B becomes column C. In the worst case, all formulas 
> are adapted.
> 
> But maybe this could also be resolved by omitting the formulas in the 
> recalculated cells.
> 

Another solution would be for ODF to allow the use of R1C1 cell address notation. That is out of scope for this SC, but if the TC adopted R1C1 notation, then insertions like this would leave most cell addresses unchanged. 

See:  http://smurfonspreadsheets.wordpress.com/2007/11/12/r1c1-notation/

This might be a general topic for ODF 1.3 -- are there things we can do to enable more efficient storage of large tables, especially now that we see million-row spreadsheet documents.

-Rob


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