Summary 2010-04-20 of OpenFormula meeting

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

Summary 2010-04-20 of OpenFormula meeting

(As always, please reply-all with corrections.)

Attendees:
David A. Wheeler
Rob Weir
Eike Rathke
Eric Patterson
Patrick Durusau
Andreas Guelzow
Michael B.
Dennis Hamilton

Note: For our current status, see the dashboard:
http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=10056


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Welcome.

Topic: Voting - please vote.

Voting closes on April 23.  If you're eligible, please vote!!


Topic: Past telecomm problems

We've worked out the problems, sorry about the problems last 2 weeks.
Rob will cover next week (David A. Wheeler can't do it).



We then walked through the NEEDS-DISCUSSION comments on JIRA.


Topic: OFFICE-2029 - WEEKNUM

http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-2029

There was a lot of discussion about WEEKNUM vs. ISOWEEKNUM.

Wheeler: The idea is that "WEEKNUM" is the U.S. convention,
where January 1 of a year is on Week 1, and every following day that
begins a "new week" increments the week number.
The European convention is implemenented by ISOWEEKNUM, where
January 4 is on week 1, and so on (see ISOWEEKNUM).
User interfaces map as desired.

We need more info from implementations.
Eric will report on Excel.
Eike will report on OpenOffice.org.  He checked and found that:
  User interface WEEKNUM_ADD is like Excel's, and maps to OpenFormula WEEKNUM.
  User internace WEEKNUM maps to OpenFormula ISOWEEKNUM.
Andreas will report on Gnumeric.



Topic: OFFICE-2334 - definition of cuboid, etc.
http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-2334

This tries to give clear and unambiguous definitions for terms such as
cell strip, cell rectangle, cell cuboid.

There's new proposed language from Dennis Hamilton, with a tweak from Eike.

There was some discussion about when you would know if you could create a cuboid.
What do we do with hidden sheets, what's the order, etc.?
(Wheeler: SHEET includes hidden, so presumably it does.)

Eliminate "sparse" definition... (A sparse cuboid, rectangle, or strip contains empty cells),
not used.  Instead, say:
"A cell cuboid, cell rectangle, or cell strip may contain empty cells."

Rob: What if the list of sheets is circular.

What about the ordering of sheets?
Clearly that ordering can matter.
Wheeler: That shouldn't be in the definition, though.

There can only be at most one source on a reference, due to the syntax in 4.8,
so a single cuboid cannot span multiple sources.

Section 5.4.11 (on ":") should note that you can't span multiple sources.



Topic: OFFICE-2641 - NUMBERVALUE
http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-2641

It turns out many different characters are used as group separators
(space, center dot, comma, period, etc.).  Eike proposed a new interface
to match.

Wheeler: Adding group separator spec makes sense, but I don't like the
addition of the text grouping (3 or whatever)... makes it too complicated.

Rob: What do current implementations do?

Wheeler: This function is a committee invention, specifically to deal with
internationalization issues.  VALUE is very locale-dependent, and we wanted a
function that could work the same way independent of locale.  At first we had a function
that took a locale parameter, but that was far too complicated, so we switched
to adding NUMBERVALUE with the parameters shown.


Dennis: "This proposal is less than a day old, needs more discussion."

Michael: We agreed last week that we want to resolve issues by next week,
or assign to ODF-Next.  For issues that need further discussion, DON'T wait
til next week... please discuss electronically.


Michael B: REMINDER: Please look at your issues, resolve or
move to ODF-Next.



--- David A. Wheeler