Issue 22662

A long time ago, I used visi-calc, and later 1-2-3. THat was early 80's.

About 10 years ago, I was re-introduced to modern spreadsheets with Improv, 
bundled with my NextStation 2.x system.

If you don't know, Improv did away with the concepts of exactly 2 dimensions, 
labeled X and Y; one sheet; using multiple areas of a sheet for different 
purposes. Instead, you had up from 1 to 8 dimensions, re-arrangable in three 
display axises. A given cell was named by all of the dimensions. A file 
consisted of multiple sheets of information, each sheet used for a single 
purpose, and zero or more displays, that don't actually have inputs, but just 
display data from different sections of different sheets.

Formulas did not exist in the cells, but were per-sheet.

As a brief example, a checkbook register could be defined by

BalanceForward[This] = EndingBalance[Prev]
EndingBalance[This] = BalanceForward[This]+Deposit[This]-Debit[This]

Refinements could handled cleared/not cleared, etc. The formulas did not have 
to be repeated for each row.

Multiple dimensions? Well, instead of having just a single "date", you might 
have "Year", "Month", and "Day" -- and then, at graphing time, re-arrange 
things so that you were looking at a single plot over time, or how the monthly 
cycles ran (how every january compared to other januaries), or the dailies (how 
the first of each month compared).

Or, you might have dimensions of "Team", "Position", "Period".
Or ...

How does this compare to "Modern" open office? Well, ...

Open office assumes that the top row (the column names) is always called A, B, 
C, etc. This means that row #1 has to have data labels. Suddenly, Row #1 is 
different from every other row. You can't actually give the columns titles; you 
have to have special case rows that don't behave like other rows.

Open Office requires that formulas be duplicated all over the place. And, it 
assumes that the spreadsheet is "Infinite" -- as you scroll around, new cells 
appear by magic in the display. But these new cells don't contain the formulas 
until you manually copy them in. You can't even make a template row, and even 
if you could, different areas would have different templates.

Open Office does have multiple sheets, so you could just have each sheet for a 
single purpose. However, I haven't (yet) seen a way to generate a "summary" 
sheet with data from each of a bunch of input/calculation sheets.

I'd like to see this sort of functionality in OO spreadsheet.

Michael

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