I had written:
> When I enter 17,00 DM I do not want to read 17,00 €, the other day.
Lars Kristan wrote:
> I know that values haven't changed.
O yes, they have: 17,00 € = 33,25 DM, i. e. much more than 17,00 DM.
Lars Kristan wrote:
> My point was - if you would change your system (user) settings
> from DM to DEM, you would expect to see DEM everywhere, wouldn't you?
Now I understand your point.
But no, I wouldn't expect that. Rather, I would expect that new
entries be labelled "DEM", but old entries left alone. When the
system would replace "DM" with "DEM", in every display, some tables
would no more align properly, and many amounts would not fit into
the available space.
> we were [...] discussing [...] MS Works. For home use. A cost
> effective and simple to use tool. You wish they would cut development
> cost at some other feature, but they didn't.
No, I simply wish that they had based their design on correct sup-
positions. A real-world value (physical, monetary, or whatever) is
not a mere number, but rather the product of a number and a unit of
measurement. Changing the unit while keeping the number will affect
the value no less than changing the number while keeping the unit.
Example:
- when you change the width of a diskette from 90 mm to 2286 mm,
it will no more fit in the drive,
- likewise, when you change its width from 90 mm to 90",
it will no more fit in the drive,
- both 90 mm, and (approximately) 3½" wide diskettes will fit in
the same drive.
A value in a spreadsheet should never inadvertently change.
Now, Works did exactly that: it multiplied every monetary value
(in Germany by 1,95583) by replacing its unit with a different
one, without notifying, let alone asking, the user. Cost-effective,
or not: You should make things as simple as possible, but never
simpler than that!
A simple spreadsheet program, would use only one monetary unit (DM,
€, or whatever) per data set (whole spreadsheet); but in contrast
to MS-Works, it would store that unit in a header field of the data
file, so it would display the correct values, regardless of the
locale the data set is displayed in. A more advanced spreadsheet
program would keep the unit with every entry (field), as MS-Excel
indeed does.
Best wishes,
Otto Stolz
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