Re: Idea on how to implement named ranges in Siag

[swedel@Tymnet.COM (Scott Wedel)]

I may be missing something essential to your proposal.  It seems
your idea is generally implemented as invisible (nondisplayed rows
or columns) cells where you have whatever and can refer to it in
other parts of the spreadsheet.

Invisible rows and columns can be a pain since it messes with
row and column numbering as visible adjacent rows do not have
adjacent numbering/lettering.  It is sometimes preferable to have
associated spreedsheets where the otherwise invisible cells are
contained.  Thus, in you main spreadsheet you have references to
cells in other spreadsheets (ie r1c1 contains foo:a1b1).

I honestly have not used siag enough to know if I can refer to
cells in other spreadsheets.  If it exists then I think your
desired functionality already exists.  If this feature does not
exist then it is definitely worth adding.  Many serious spreadsheet
users have all sorts of references between spreadsheets.  Things
like a yearly budget spreadsheet consisting of the summary items
of a SS for each month.  and each month's speadsheet refering back
to totals in the yearly SS to show the percentage of the year's
budget being spent in that month.  So what would be a huge and
difficult to work with SS, is at least 13 SSs with cross references.

And the advantage of having your foo block contained in another
SS is then you have all your functionality for modifying it as
well.

What would be a nice feature for cross referenced SSs is the ability
to change the associated filename of the cross reference.  ie if
curMonth:a1 is a crossreference to a1 stored in file 09_98 then
today I could change curMonth to look in file 10_98 for a1.

						sdw