On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 15:54, pasty camel wrote:
I work as a structural engineer in Australia, and the design of steel, concrete, timber, etc, is dictated by a set of codes. Design codes are different between countries, and often states within the country, and they tend to use slightly different equations to determine the capacity of any given member. For example, the effective stiffness of a concrete member experiencing in service deflection, as proposed by Branson is Ief = Icr + (Ig + Icr)(Mcr / M*)^3 This relationship is specific to an assumption employed by the Australian concrete design codes and as such is probably not really suitable for inclusion in the set of Gnumeric functions. But the ability to create a simple function to perform this equation makes debugging the spreadsheet much easier. The above example is a relatively straight forward one, they certainly become more complex (if you're not careful) and often involve iteration through a set of data points.
Thank you very much. I think that this is a really good example to justify the need for scripts.
This said, the python plugin feature allows a cell within the spreadsheet to pass variables to an external python function. The cell will display the python function's returned result. This is good and is pretty much what I'm looking for. However plugins become a global setting for every sheet opened with Gnumeric, and I'm hoping to be able to write separate functions for separate sheets. The help manual has a page that hints of the possibility. By the way, If I could work out how to do this kind of thing, I'd be happy to write some stuff for the help manual.
I found the easiest way to figure out how to write help texts is to look at the xml files in doc/C on cvs and then just to try writing something.
Oh, one other point regarding the help system. It is possible to return to the earlier system - pre-gnome2 - where help opened immediately without the delay we are currently experiencing.
yelp 2.5 (for gnome 2.6) is promising to open those help files again very speedily. Andreas
-- Andreas J. Guelzow <aguelzow taliesin ca> Taliesin
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