Re: How to insert names (NEW USER) ++ and USE them!

[Andreas Guelzow <aguelzow pyrshep ca>]

On Tue, 2011-12-27 at 10:20 -0800, bob_hayden wrote:
> Thank you very much.  That will enable me to do what I need to do.  The real
> issue turned out to be that Excel's default is to assign a named range an
> absolute address while Gnumeric's is to assign a relative address.  (Hence I
> post this to the list in case that confuses others.)

You appear to be using a 1.8.x release. In oter words a very old
Gnumeric version. Gnumeric 1.10.0 was released on 2010-02-13, nearly 2
years ago. The last stable release of Gnumeric was 1.10.17 released on
2011-07-31.

In any recent version of Gnumeric, by default defining a name uses
absolute addresses.

>   May I ask a question
> (or make a suggestion) about the implementation here?  One of the reasons to
> have a drop-down list of names is to help the user keep track of their names
> and avoid problems caused by typos in entering names, so it seems to me some
> aid in this would be useful in Gnumeric. 

In any recent version of Gnumeric you can use F3 to raise a dialog to
select a defined name and paste it into a formula currently being
edited.

>  Then from my own limited
> experience and the examples I see in textbooks it seems that a named range
> would almost always have an absolute address so I am curious why Gnumeric
> defaults to a relative one?

see above (ie. it has been defaulting to an absolute address for quite
a while.)

> I don't mean to suggest that whatever Excel does is the gold standard.  (I
> normally use the 1995 version of Lotus 1-2-3 for my own work;-)  However,
> all my clients insist on using Excel.     I am trying to wean them away from
> that but missing features or things that work differently generate doubt. 
> In some cases, for example the superior algorithms for probability
> distributions in Gnumeric, I can give a good reason why Gnumeric is
> different -- and better!

In the moment you are missing all changes/improvements that happened in
the 1.10 stable series. We are currently working on the 1.11 development
series. Yo may want to consider upgrading Gnumeric to 1.10.17.

Andreas
> Jean Brefort-2 wrote:
> > > ... For example, in an application
> > > I piloted in Excel 2000, I needed to work with a block of 30,000 cells. 
> > > It
> > > gets tiresome highlighting that with a mouse, so in Excel I named if
> > > "Fred"
> > > and can select the whole block by pulling down the Name window and
> > > selecting
> > > Fred.  But in Gnumeric that window just shows single cell addresses.
> >
> > Type Fred in the selection entry at left of the formula entry.
> >
> > >   I can
> > > also do this in Calc where I can, for example, enter a formula like
> > > "=sum(Fred)" and get something reasonable while Gnumeric just returns 0
> > > no
> > > matter what is in Fred.
> >
> > "=sum(Fred)" works for me. Can you send me a sample file were it does
> > not work? I didn't test with 1.8 though, much too old here.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Jean
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnumeric-list mailing list
> > gnumeric-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list

-- 
Andreas Guelzow <aguelzow pyrshep ca>