Re: [office] Proposal for Spreadsheets: New sort option "natural sort"

[Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Hi David,

David Faure wrote:
> On Monday 05 February 2007, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
>> Hi David,
>>
>> I think we have some kind of conflicting requirements here: You either 
>> want to be able to sort floating point numbers. You then need to 
>> interpret the decimal delimiter. Or you want to be able to sort version 
>> numbers. You then must not interpret the decimal delimiter.
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> I hadn't realized that difference, which means that any generic code that implements
> "natural sorting" must take into account those two different requirements/algorithms.
> 
>> What about resolving this conflict by having two options (or three, if 
>> the include the default character code based sorting) instead of one, 
>> "natural-integer" and "natural-float", where the first one sorts only 
>> integer values, while the 2nd one sorts floats?
> 
> Well, now that we identified two ways of doing natural sorting, we still need
> to answer: are both ways useful in spreadsheets? I admit that I'm the one who
> broadened the scope of the discussion, thinking about that code for filemanagers
> we have, but if the spreadsheet authors say that from a spreadsheet point of view
> we only need the natural-float mechanism, then that's fine with me. No point in
> specifying things that are not useful.
> 

I've just talked to OOo's spreadsheet experts: They think there are use 
cases where sorting by integers may be required (for instance the 
version numbers, but also chapter numbers), but don't know how often 
they occur. So, it is up to you. If you would like to have this options, 
its okay for them, but it is also okay for them if this option does not 
exist.

Michael