GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 162480
functions to refer to header and footer
Last modified: 2010-06-15 20:27:14 UTC
I would like to see the following feature implemented in Gnumeric, which I also missed in XL: - make it possible to use functions in header and footer of a page like this Custom header configuration Left section: =Sheet1!A1 This feature would allow to generate texts in headers and footer which depend on the contents of "normal" cells. I missed this feature in generating automated reports or applications like this. As a general design approach the sections (left, middle, right) of header and footer could be implemented with the same functionality as "normal" cells, but with special addresses like sheet1!header!left or sheet1!header1 or sheet1!header!A1 This also will allow to reference the content of header/footer cells by other cells.
A nice idea. We'll need to rework and extend the hooks for headers/footers eventualyl to support XP's extensions for things like font characteristics and images. Adding extensions to pull in data would be nice. It's hard to say how XLS export would handle it, but we can probably just strip it, and put in the current value.
With the next released version &[cell:$A$3] and &[cell:Sheet2!$A$3] will include the content of cell $A$3 on the current Sheet and on Sheet2 respectively. I am leaving this open with a changed title (and a changed component) since this does not address the second suggestion. Personally I think it would be better to implement that as function calls rather than as as references: =header("Sheet1",1) or so.
While it seems useful to include sheet data in the headers and footers, that is in fact already possible. There doesn't seem to be a real use case for being able to refer to the header footer info from within the sheet. I'll therefore close it as WONTFIX.