Quattro Pro Matrices

["Stan J. Klimas" <sklimas nrtco net>]

Quattro Pro used to have some interesting features that I don't see in 
Gnumeric (or MS Excel).  I wonder if it was ever considered.

I mean handling of "arrays", where a formula in a single cell could fill up an 
entire region.  XESS for Linux has something similar---formulas which can 
return values to more than one cell, like 
"A2:  Overflow from cell A1" (cool for returning a value into one cell, and a 
unit or an quick explanation into the next cell).
 
The QP hanling of arrays was interesting to me, because it can make 
spreadsheets of certain (common) type much smaller. I once compared two 
identical spreadsheets: one in QuattroPro the other in MS Excel. The Excel's 
handling of arrays appeared brainless to me. My observations could be 
explained by the following example.

Consider such a spreadsheet:
A1 ... A1000    filled with numbers.
B1 ..  B1000    filled with numbers.
Now typing into the cell C1 such a formula:
=A1..A1000+B1..B1000
fills up the region C1..C1000, each cell with a sum of two numbers to the left 
(C1=A1+B1, C2=A2+B2, etc).
The gain is that the formula is stored in the spreadsheet only once. 
The alternative would by to type into C1: " =A1+B1"  and copy the formula to 
the region C2..C1000.
The example formula would appear to take at least 6 bytes (6 characters). 
Therefore, the gain is ~6 kB for this simple example spreadsheet. Now imagine 
a spreadsheet wtih long formulae in several columns. I had spreadsheets where 
the difference in size between the old QP and old Excel could run in many 
megabytes. Since I dropped QP, I do not count sizes of Excel's spreadsheets 
any more so do not know if it is still so brainless.

BTW, using <Ctrl><Alt> <Enter> for Excel-style arrays does not help in size at 
all. I do not really understand what the point of this kind of array is, 
besides "region protection" and monkey key combinations.

Just some rumbling. Thank for all of you for you wonderful work on gnumeric!