SUMIF, COUNTIF, COUNTBLANK, DCOUNT, DSUM, ... with empty cells and "" and ="" empty string criteria

[Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com>]

Hi,

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.

  Eike

-- 
Automatic string conversions considered dangerous. They are the GOTO statements
of spreadsheets.  --Robert Weir on the OpenDocument formula subcommittee's list.