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Re: [LUG] Annual Budgets: Freedom of Information Act

 

tom wrote:
> 
> well Excel now offers well beyond the
> "standard"  256 columns on a spreadsheet (OO doesn't yet from what I 
> understand and despite the numerous other advantages the OO.org offers 
> this is the most important ?)

The limits in OO2 (2.2.1) are basically the same as Excel had until
Excel 2007 version (256 columns, 65536 rows). So presumably if there was
a burning need for this functionality the users presumably already
switched to something other than Excel. Perhaps by recompiling Gnumeric
with bigger limits ?! ;)

This one was quite amusing;

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculation-issue-update.aspx

Spreadsheets make me nervous, many users spreadsheets have hideous bugs in.

At least now (in 2007) Excel is far more likely to give you the right
answers, even if it can't display some of the numbers correctly.

Doing Maths in computers well is a lot harder than most people realise.
A great example I heard was the bug the Met. Office found in the invert
register of a Cray CPU which gave an error in (IIRC) the 12th decimal
place. It was spotted because "inverse(x) * y" didn't give the same
answer as "y/x", and a maths function changed from one to other,
although finding the cause of such changes in big software suites isn't
always easy. Of course most people don't care about the 12th decimal
place of anything, but you kind of assume these things are correct if a
computer prints them out.




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