Re: Unit validation in spreadsheets

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 08:39:15AM -0800, Paul Steckler wrote:
> We've designed a technology for adding physical
> and financial unit validation to spreadsheets.  A
> description of our prototype for Excel is in a paper
> to appear in the Intl. Conference on Software
> Engineering (ICSE '04) this May.

Sounds interesting.
 
> To make this technology work well, it needs to be
> closely integrated with a spreadsheet.  Our prototype
> is an add-on to Excel, and that's just too slow.  Though we've
> described it to folks we know at Microsoft, it's unlikely
> they'll be interested in adding unit validation to Excel.

Not exactly surprising.  VBA is useful for adding actions, but as
far as I can tell is not designed for extending the core of XL.

> Would folks in this community be interested in
> having unit validation to Gnumeric?
Certainly.  As previously mentioned we've got small versions of that
sort of functionality for the autoformater.  We also had a recent
discussion on how to extend the MS XL style format strings to handle
SI (metric) unit prefixes.  We'd need to be able to disable the
checking to keep users unfamiliar with the process comfortable, but
I doubt that would be onerous.

> What would be the best way to get that done?
In what sense ?  Having a clear design of how the feature interacts
with other features from a user perspective would be a good starting
point.  It would greatly decrease the number of development
iterations.  Now is a good time development wise to work on this
sort of thing, we'll be releasing 1.3.x tarballs for the next few
months.  So there is room to develop.

When were you thinking of working on this ?