The thing MS Works did not do is something that MS Access *did* do, starting
with Access 2.0. They store the information about the locale settings along
with the decision to make something a currency field, so that if the locale
changes the monetary value stays the same.
It was more work, but it was worth it (especially with the move to the Euro
when people started actually noticing the behavior!). Excellent decision by
the international PM of the time. :-)
MichKa
Michael Kaplan
Trigeminal Software, Inc. -- http://www.trigeminal.com/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lars Kristan" <lars.kristan@hermes.si>
To: "'Otto Stolz'" <Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de>
Cc: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 7:33 AM
Subject: RE: [OT] Broken monetary settings in MS Works (was: Standard
Conventions and euro)
> 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
>
>
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