RE: [office-comment] ODFF: XIRR

["David King" <openoffice@drking.plus.com>]

Hi Dennis

> Can you recommend authoritative sources

In short, I'm afraid not - there are many books about, but because I'm 
not a 
specialist I think it would be unwise for me to recommend. I found 
mistakes in 
one book... And many sources skirt around the detail.

The good news is that we now have a pretty good understanding of what 
the 
financial functions actually do - and I think ODFF will nail it down so 
that 
future implementors can succeed (in a way that OOXML has not). The main 
outstanding issue is probably the calendar systems, which David Wheeler 
is 
working on I think.

The bad news is that it's hard to know how useful (and used) the 
financial 
functions are. Two of the Calc functions always return an error, and no-
one 
complained (I've raised an issue now). I suspect that despite the huge 
effort 
of implementation, not many people find them useful, except for students 
doing 
assignments. Personally, as things are at the moment, I'd often be more 
inclined to go back to basic principles, so I could be sure of the 
result...

> I'm concerned that we have authoritative subject-matter expertise for 
citation and also comparison with what various programs do. 

Agreed, a good point, but it's hard to find the right *international* 
expertise. Or at least I've found it so. I think the financial functions 
are 
quite biased towards the US.

We also have to remember that a spreadsheet is a general tool, and that 
specialist software will always do more for that area. Like R and 
statistics.

Not sure it that helps at all...

David