GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 131486
value -4^2 -> 16, OOo bug accepted
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Gnumeric has a cool feature : when enter =-4^2, it's being tranformed into =(-4)^2, and results 16. It avoid confusion between (-4)^2 and -(4^2). Maybe, In future Gnumeric development, enter =-4^2 should be transformed into =-(4^2). In OOo bug report, Excel -4^2 -> 16 has been accepted as bug after a long discussion (http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=24271). It seems to be there is a report in Microsoft technet (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx? scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/q132/6/86.asp&NoWe bContent=1&NoWebContent=1). Seems that Corel quattro (and lotus 1-2-3 ?) hasn't got this problem.
We had a long discussion about this issue. I personally would prefer to see -4^2 to be interpreted as -(4^2) but of course I am only a mathematician. In any case, we settled for having -4^2 to be automatically and visibly converted to (-4)^2. (In a vertain mood I would say that that was the bone thrown my way...) In any case, officially this is not a bug but a compatibility feature. Of course if OO is changing we will have to watch for the OO import now!
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 115941 ***