GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 305798
Support VOLATILE functions.
Last modified: 2014-03-05 19:46:59 UTC
I have to perform a manual refresh (with the F9 key) every time I open a spreadsheet which uses the today() function to get the current day's date. It would be easier if this was automatically calculated and refreshed if necessary upon opening the spreadsheet. Other information:
Hi, would you please provide some additional information: Which exact version of gnumeric are you using? In Format->Workbook on the calculation tab, what is the setting for `Recalculation'? Thanks
I'm using version 1.4.3. Recalculation is set to "Automatic". I just realised that it only applies to the sheets I keep in MS Excel 97/2000/XP format. I guess it just doesn't get refreshed after importing. Perhaps it's not as important as I thought. It is quite useful to be able to keep spreadsheets in .xls format :).
.xls format stores the last value calculated; .gnumeric does not. This is as designed. Jody: consider closing as NOTABUG or WONTFIX.
However data is stored in the .xls format, when I open the sheet in Excel, the values for "today()" are updated. When I open the same sheet in Gnumeric, they are not.
This is a real bug. Gnumeric does not currently mark expressions with volative functions as needing special handling.
In addition to volatile functions such as today we have various statistical functions where gnumeric's calculation is more precise than Excel's. So the values stored in an xls file (created by Excel) may not be the values one would obatin in Gnumeric. So should we not recalculate all of them?
andreas : It's a significant performance penalty to recalc everything, but I agree that we should recalc functions where we intend to differ from XL.
I do realize that there would be a possibly unacceptable performance penalty, but then why aren't we saving values in gnumeric files?
andreas : because the xml was written before people understood spreadsheets and there's no really convenient place to put them.
*** Bug 644123 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 725599 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
http://www.decisionmodels.com/calcsecretsi.htm Volatile: NOW, TODAY, RAND. Possible: CELL, INFO Excel further needs INDIRECT and OFFSET because its calculation engine cannot handle them.
Plugin functions should probably also be handled, or have a flag indicating volatility.
> Plugin functions should probably also be handled, or have a flag indicating > volatility. All our functions[*] are plugin functions, so that's no problem. [*] Well, except a handful.
This problem has been fixed in our software repository. The fix will go into the next software release. Thank you for your bug report.