Re: Gnumeric and applix-style views?

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 07:15:35AM -0500, Michael George wrote:
> For those not familiar, an Applix View is a copy of a page of a
> spreadsheet which can have rows and colums removed to compress the
> page into a more information-rich page.  The data stays the same
> from the original to the view, even with subsequent modifications
> to either view, but the subordinate view has fewer rows and/or
> columns.

> Does gnumeric support such a feature?  If so, what is it called that I may
> check out the manual on it?
 
Gnumeric does not support this. Supporting this would would break
the SUBTOTAL function.  Gnumeric can not support view specific cell
values, and SUBTOTAL sums the visible cells.  If those are different
across views then a cell would take on multiple values.  
 
Beyond that Conceptually it would not be too difficult to add.  We
already have a notion of a SheetView that is distinct from Sheet.
However, it would be a fairly significant amount of work.  For
obvious reasons there is alot of code that is interested in the
visibility status of rows/cols.  Changing the location of that
information would entail some fairly significant changes.

The simplest solution to both problems would probably be to add a
secondary layer of col/row hidding.  The existing code in Sheet
would be the primary filter, and additional views would be
layered on top.  It would complicate the UI a bit because we'd need
to somehow mark a view as being primary or secondary, but its doable.

There are other things that are higher priority, so I don't expect
to work on this anytime soon.  However, as always it would be a nice
project for anyone interested.