Re: Gnumeric and applix-style views?

[Michael George <george mutualdata com>]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 11:14:14AM -0500, Jody Goldberg wrote:
>  
> Gnumeric does not support this. Supporting this would would break
> the SUBTOTAL function.  Gnumeric can not support view specific cell
> values, and SUBTOTAL sums the visible cells.  If those are different
> across views then a cell would take on multiple values.  

Hmm, that makes sense.  SUBTOTAL is not a feature that I've used before...

> Beyond that Conceptually it would not be too difficult to add.  We
> already have a notion of a SheetView that is distinct from Sheet.
> However, it would be a fairly significant amount of work.  For
> obvious reasons there is alot of code that is interested in the
> visibility status of rows/cols.  Changing the location of that
> information would entail some fairly significant changes.
>
> The simplest solution to both problems would probably be to add a
> secondary layer of col/row hidding.  The existing code in Sheet
> would be the primary filter, and additional views would be
> layered on top.  It would complicate the UI a bit because we'd need
> to somehow mark a view as being primary or secondary, but its doable.

Maybe a col/row hiding template feature would work?  One could define a
template which contains all the necessary rows and columns to hide and opt to
apply or unapply it.  Actually, I'd say that you can chose to apply it and if
one wants it "unapplied" you just do a show all.

That would allow me to define a common "hiding mask" and apply it to my
invoices just before I print them.  No data is lost, I print just what I want,
and I don't have to do the same column selections for each sheet, I could just
apply the template.

> There are other things that are higher priority, so I don't expect
> to work on this anytime soon.  However, as always it would be a nice
> project for anyone interested.

Understood.  I'm anxiously awaiting Gnumeric 1.2.x, ready for public
consumption.  Short of that, if I get RHL 8.1 w/ GNOME2, I can probably easily
build gnumeric 1.1.x and import my Applix data files and at least have a path
to the future. :)  I hope someday to be caught up with work enough that I can
contribute more, and maybe this will be one of my first features to add...

Thanks for the info, Jody!

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