Re: Formulas in CSV files

[Anthony Heading <aheading jpmorgan com>]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2003 at 11:50:30AM +0100, Spencer Collyer wrote:
> > That was a bug.
>
> A remarkably useful bug, then. I'd call it a feature myself. From a couple
> of quick tests, both Excel (97) and OpenOffice.org (1.0.2) allow you to do
> this.

Agreed.  Excel has done this for as long as I can remember.  I've seen it
used many times as a quick way to create spreadsheet files.

I've never thought of it as a bug.  It's consistent with the result
of typing in the same data, or indeed copy-and-pasting it.

It can be avoided if need be: Excel has an "Import Data" wizard
(under the Data menu), which leads to a dialog where one can configure
how each column is treated.

Ah. In fact I see Gnumeric has a similar wizard.  But Gnumeric
appears to be presenting a choice of cell formatting (number and
currency and accounting and so on).  I don't think that makes
as much sense as Excel, which rather is giving an option of how
the imported string is to be _parsed_. 

The Excel default of "General" for cells is to recognize numbers,
dates and formulas and evaluate them accordingly.  Pragmatically,
it's a pretty useable de-facto standard: I'd suggest Gnumeric being
much stricter here is not to anyone's benefit in practice.

Anthony



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