Otto Stolz wrote:
> At home, where I use MS Works (4.51 IIRC) and Windows 95 (with Y2K and
> Euro patches) the new year brought a bad surprise (or should I say:
> revealed a severe design error in MS Works?):
>
> When I changed, in the Windows system locale, the monetary setting to
> Euros, all monetary amounts in all my Works spreadsheeds were
> effektively
> multiplied by 1.95583 (i. e., Works simply displayed an
> €-sign in place
> of the former "DM"). Incredible!
Of course if it was not that way and you would for some reason decide to use
DEM instead of DM (or Lit. instead of L.), then you would complain about the
design flaw because your old entries would not be updated.
A good design would be to keep the numbers in both raw and formatted forms,
and ask whether to convert when system (well user) settings differ. This
would be useful also for example for spreadsheets sent from one country to
another.
If however, a full blown design would be used that would provide
'per-currency' configuration, you would probably complain it is difficult to
use because in most cases you would not need 'all that crap'.
So, until computers learn to read your mind, you'll have to put up with a
lot of perfectly logical nonsense.
Lars Kristan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Mar 01 2002 - 10:50:09 EST