Re: [office-formula] Who's doing what this week, Redux (including a requestto Stefan Nikolas)

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

Eike.Rathke@sun.com wrote on 02/14/2007 06:41:42 PM:

> Hi Robert,
> 
> On Wednesday, 2007-02-14 14:14:08 -0500, Robert Weir wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> If we enhance the function such that Excel can't calculate it anyway,
> why not add fractional workdays if those fractions are given in a
new
> optional parameter array? This functions is used to calculate a deadline
> or similar dates, so including/excluding fractional days seems a valid
> approach to me. But as said previously, maybe just overkill.
> 

The function in Excel takes a start date, and end
date, and optionally a list of dates to be treated as holidays.  These
are all treated as whole days in Excel.  So you can't specify half-day
holidays.  I'm proposing that we allow the definition of the weekend
to vary as well, but in whole day increments, to match the functionality
of the other parameters.

I'm not sure it is as useful to allow a work week
definition that includes fractional days, but still have the holidays list
be whole days.  But if we allow fractional holidays and/or fractional
start/end dates, then we've gone further from the original Excel function.

So I'm proposing that we stay with the "whole
day" limitation of the Excel function and merely fix the internationalization
issue of the original.

-Rob