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------- Additional comments from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Nov 29 14:29:04 +0000 2007 ------- > I need negative votes. I disagree with this proposal. Only because you are an ivory-tower theorist who knows absolutely NOTHING about how spreadsheets are used in the real world. > Empty cells are empty and are neither a number nor a text. That is correct. Therefore, at best they should be ignored in a calculation and not generate an error. What should really happen is that the behavior should be consistent with every other spreadsheet program that has ever been written. > The current behavior of MIN/MINA/MAX/MAXA is correct. No it isn't and runs counter to 25+ years of user spreadsheet experience. > Indeed it is inconsistent with SUM, but the error is in the SUM > function. SUM should return an error in this situation. What planet do you live on? This may be correct in some theoretical, ivory tower programming universe, but it runs counter to what EVERY spreadsheet from Visicalc to Lotus 1-2-3 to Quattro Pro to Excel has EVER done over the past 25+ years. There's a real good reason for that. In the real world, people design spreadsheets with blank cells to accommodate future data. These cells are manipulated with functions like SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, etc. As the data accumulates, it is often summarized. If these functions return errors when encountering blank cells, then the summaries contain errors instead of doing the logical thing, which is (usually) to ignore blank cells in calculations. The only issue is then what to do if a range contains ALL blank cells. This is not difficult. If you are summing blanks, it is logical FROM A USER PERSPECTIVE to return a 0. This is what Calc currently does and is consistent with every other spreadsheet ever written. It should be the same for MAX. For MAXA, the logical thing to do FROM A USER PERSPECTIVE would be to return a blank (or a 0, take your pick). > I think the behavior on empty cells should be discussed in UX > project in general before changing anything. Yes, and if you do keep in mind how others have done it before you. Breaking new ground for some theoretical reason is idiotic. This is simple and to think you have the "right" answer in the face of how developers have done it and how users have used it over the entire history of spreadsheets is ARROGANT and WRONG. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please do not reply to this automatically generated notification from Issue Tracker. Please log onto the website and enter your comments. http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html#notification --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
