Some of the issues being raised suggest that a spreadsheet is not the right analytic tool. How about a data frame in R? There are easy transformations from spreadsheet to data-frame and back (and they should be better set up but are not to my knowledge!). R allows character strings to be converted to factors which can be very useful in some analyses e.g., regressions. There are quite a few character handling functions, and some support for regexes, though I will not claim any expertise in using the latter.
My own opinion, as a supporter of gnumeric, is that we sometimes try too hard to do everything in the spreadsheet. JN _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list gnumeric-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
