office-formula message
[Date Prev]
| [Thread Prev]
| [Thread Next]
| [Date Next]
--
[Date Index]
| [Thread Index]
| [List Home]
Subject: Re: [office-formula] Who's doing what this week, Redux (including a requestto Stefan Nikolas)
- From: robert_weir@us.ibm.com
- To: dwheeler@dwheeler.com
- Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:14:08 -0500
The existing function deals with whole
days. Excel explicitly defines it that way. Even if you give it
a date serial number that is noon one day to 5pm another day, it will not
return a fractional number of workdays. I'm not suggesting we expand
it to include such a feature.
My interest was purely in the internationalization
aspect, that the legal definition of the work week in some nations is not
M-F.
So, we handle it by simply adding an
optional enumeration value which defines what a weekend is. 0 (default)
= Sat/Sun, 1=Thurs/Friday and 2=Friday/Sat.
If we wanted the full generality, we
could have instead an optional array parameter of 7 values, evaluated as
booleans for whether that day of the week is a weekend or not. That
has the advantage of working for partial week schedules as well as 1-day
weekends.
-Rob
___________________________
Rob Weir
Software Architect
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Software Group
email: robert_weir@us.ibm.com
phone: 1-978-399-7122
blog: http://www.robweir.com/blog/
"David A. Wheeler"
<dwheeler@dwheeler.com>
02/14/2007 01:36 PM
Please respond to
dwheeler@dwheeler.com |
|
To
| office-formula@lists.oasis-open.org
|
cc
|
|
Subject
| Re: [office-formula] Who's doing what
this week, Redux (including a request to Stefan Nikolas) |
|
David A. Wheeler wrote:
> > Robert Weir has volunteered to do NETWORKDAYS and WORKDAY, since
they
> > have the same I18N issues. Basically, he's going to need
to add an
> > additional optional parameter to handle internationalization
Eike Rathke responded:
> If we add a parameter that no application is supporintg yet I suggest
to
> define it the way that if the parameter is not given comply with the
> Ecma/Excel definition. Eases interoperability.
Oh, absolutely, that was the reason I want it optional. Sorry I didn't
make that clear. It's really not just Ecma/Excel; I think everyone
does it the same way.
> > - not EVERYONE's weekend is Saturday/Sunday. I see two
major options:
> > (1) a parameter saying which day of the week begins a two-day
weekend,
> > or
...
> > (2) a parameter that's a boolean representation of the days of
the
> > week that are to be considered non-workdays. Option #2
is more
> > flexible, but also is harder to implement and explain... does
anyone
> > care which way he goes?
>
Eike adds a #3:
> It may also be necessary to include half days, as in "Saturday
is half
> day off, Sunday one day". The most flexible IMHO would be to
have an
> array with a factor in the range [0,1] for each weekday, if that's
not
> considered overkill.
Eek. Actually, you can even pile on the overkill further; many people
in the U.S. work in 2-week cycles, so they work 5 days one week and 4 days
in the alternate week. That would add yet another option:
#4: The new optional parameter accepts an array; if 14 days instead of
7, it that describes a two-week cycle.
I think #3 and #4 are more flexible but would be much harder to use. You
could partly address that yet another option:
#5: Merge #2, #3, #4. Basically, detect if the new parameter is a scalar
number, and if so, interpret as #2. If the new param is array/multi-cell
range, then interpret as #3 or #4 (depending on its length). That
might make common cases easier to use, and still be very flexible - but
it's more work to implement.
I have to admit that #3, #4, and #5 seem awfully like overkill to me. Does
anyone have an opinion on what is best for our purposes?
--- David A. Wheeler
[Date Prev]
| [Thread Prev]
| [Thread Next]
| [Date Next]
--
[Date Index]
| [Thread Index]
| [List Home]