Re: Open Office file formats (Oasis-open) and gnumeric

[Morten Welinder <terra diku dk>]

> Will users know when they are using features that will be lossy
> when exported to formats other than the Gnumeric format?

That is a goal, but we haven't actually done it yet.  One would get
a warning when saving, say something like

  "Your spreadsheet uses features [click for details] that are not
  available in the foo file format.  What do you want to do?
  [Cancel]  [Translate]   [Export Lossy]  ..."

(Where "translate" would make a non-lossy translation and obviously
wouldn't always be available.)

> Is this feature worth the "best viewed by" problems that will exist?  

This problem will arise in lots of circumstances: #rows, #cols,
#sheets, charsets, special functions, slightly incompatible functions,
restrictions of names in the form of length/forbidden characters/
reserved words.

In practice we hope to get it "good enough" in the sense that anyone
who gets hit by it realises that "I deserved that!"

XL95 and XL97 are probably inherently incompatible due to the different
number of rows and row-wraparound semantics.  Think of it as TeX'
"Interwoven alignment preambles are not allowed" error message which
is only described as "If you have been so devious as to get this message,
you will understand it, and you will deserve no sympathy."

Morten