Re: [office-formula] CONVERT

["Andreas J. Guelzow" <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca>]

On Thu, 2007-01-02 at 22:51 +0100, Eike Rathke wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 6.14.17 CONVERT has
> 
> | TODO: There are two different “CONVERT” functions, Excel's and
> | OpenOffice.org's, which have completely different semantics.   OO.org
> | also has Excel's, but by a different name.  Need to determine what to
> | name those two functions, as well as document their semantics.
> 
> I suggest to have both, CONVERT and CONVERT_E.
> 
> The OOo CONVERT function takes an amount and two arbitrary units as
> arguments, for which a conversion factor can be defined in the shared or
> the user configuration, with some predefined factors for conversions
> between Euro and the old currencies. However, it is not restricted to
> monetary conversion as long as a single factor is sufficient to do the
> conversion.
> 
> The Excel CONVERT_E function knows some conversions that are not
> expressible as single factors, such as between temperatures that have
> a linear offset, and does some matching on symbols of decimal
> (sub)multiples of units (p,cm,m,k,...). On the other hand it doesn't
> know anything about currencies and is not extendible.

Gnumeric implements Excel's CONVERT and uses that name. I don't know
about others but we should probably chose the name assignment to satisfy
the majority, so if more functions call Excel's version CONVERT than
that name ought to be used for the excel version.

Andreas

-- 
Andreas J. Guelzow, Professor
Dept. of Mathematical & Computing Sciences
Concordia University College of Alberta