Re: [office] Data Grid Size element proposal

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

On Mon, 2008-11-24 at 12:44 -0800, Warren Turkal wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 20:30, Andreas J Guelzow
> <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 18:09 -0800, Warren Turkal wrote:
> >> I don't really see the problem with an error being caused by a
> >> reference to a cell outside the user agent's range going away when
> >> opening the doc in a user agent with a greater number of cells. I
> >> could only see that mattering if you rely on the error for some logic
> >> in your spreadsheet. That just seems like a bad idea.
> >>
> >> But maybe I am being dense here. If so, could you please give a
> >> concrete and real world example?
> >
> > Let's see:
> > The following formula is from
> > http://theimmersivelife.blogspot.com/2008/08/tools-of-trade-google-apps-as.html
> > =ARRAYFORMULA(OFFSET(A1,INT(MAX(NOT(ISBLANK(C3:C200))*(COLUMNS($B1:
> > $IW1)*ROW(C3:C200)+COLUMN(C3:C200)))/COLUMNS($B1:
> > $IW1))-1.0,MOD(MAX(NOT(ISBLANK(C3:C200))*(COLUMNS($B1:
> > $IW1)*ROW(C3:C200)+COLUMN(C3:C200)))/COLUMNS($B1:$IW1),1.0)*COLUMNS($B1:
> > $IW1)-1.0))
> >
> > This formula is invalid in Gnumeric with its default grid size but would
> > be valid with a larger gridsize. Suppose a program with a larger
> > gridsize saves this formula, it would be useful if gnumeric could easily
> > determine that the sheet comes from such a larger grid.
> 
> Couldn't Gnumeric tell if the formula referred to cells outside it's
> gridsize? It seems like it could just notify the user if a cell is
> addressed that isn't within it's grid size.

Of course we could tell the user that "hey there are formulas that
appear to require 319 columns and 1231124 rows" after we have parsed the
whole file and all of its formulas. I believe it would be desirable to
tell the user that the sheet was created in a program with 400 columns
and 2000000 rows so that there might be references or content outside
the range before we start reading such a big file in its entirety.

> 
> Wouldn't Gnumeric know if a sheet was loaded that had values outside
> it's gridsize? It seems that information would already be in an ODS
> file. For instance, if Gnumeric could only load 256 columns and a
> value for the cell "$IW$1" is defined in the file, wouldn't it be
> possible for Gnumeric know that it couldn't address that cell?
> Wouldn't it be good to notify the user the the file being loaded had
> data that cannot be addressed or saved in that case?
> 
> > http://groups.google.com/group/How-to-Documents/browse_thread/thread/1f3ab6e086392bd4 seems to do some similar.
> 
> This isn't depending on the error at all. It seems to be depending on
> functionality of Google Spreadsheets allowing addressing of cells out
> of its range. For instance, I can have up to 256 that I can address
> and update. If I do put "=IW19*3" (column 257, row 19) in a cell
> though, I get 0 instead of some error. I don't think this situation
> makes a case for the explicit maximum size.

If you try to put "=IW19*3" into a cell in Gnumeric you get an error
rather than 0. This is a problem if you are at all concerned about
interoperability.

Andreas