[OASIS Issue Tracker] Commented: (OFFICE-3768) 4.7 Empty Cell terminology

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    [ http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-3768?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=31446#action_31446 ] 

Andreas Guelzow  commented on OFFICE-3768:
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I think if we are talking about cells we are really thinking of ODF. And in ODF a table cell is empty when it has no office:value-type or an office:value-type of "void".

I don't think changing the term "empty cell" to "unassigned cell" really help since elsewhere in the standard (say 6.13.14) we introduce another term "blank" for a cell without value. There is matches the function name ISBLANK. So if we want to introduce one consistent term we should probably use "blank" since we can't really change ISBLANK.

> 4.7 Empty Cell terminology
> --------------------------
>
>                 Key: OFFICE-3768
>                 URL: http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/OFFICE-3768
>             Project: OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: OpenFormula
>    Affects Versions: ODF 1.2
>            Reporter: Andre Rebentisch
>
> The terminology "Empty Cell" in the specification creates semantic confusion because we also find the empty string of type Text. The term makes parts of the specification ambigious and unintuitive to read, for instance (cmp. OFFICE-3764) in 4.11.8 "For =, if the value is empty it matches empty cells."
> The definition in 4.7 reads "Empty Cell - An empty cell is neither zero nor the empty string, and an empty cell can be distinguished from cells containing values (including zero and the empty string). An empty cell is not the same as an Error, in particular, it is distinguishable from the Error #N/A (not available)."

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