Description: the status bar provides default calculations when selecting a range. Instead of manually selecting a range, its not weird to select an entire row or column clicking on the top or left headers and that selects everything. Text is ignored for this purpose, and dates should be ignored or properly dealt with too Steps to Reproduce: 1. add a date cell and number cell or 2 date cells 2. select date field and the other cell Actual Results: weird average and sum numbers Expected Results: to ignore date fields, or to use a different default when dates are involved, like days betweed 2 dates, or whatever other useful result you can make up of 2 dates, just like average and sum are good defaults for numbers Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: No Additional Info: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Because dates are numbers in the cells, and only the format makes they showed as dates. SUM doesn't take care of text even if it looks as number.
Yep, it's not a bug (double-checked with Eike). Closing.
Well, the bug is not about the sum not doing what its supposed to do, but about the status bar not showing a useful default value... Which is what that space in the status bar is designed to do It should show a useful default calculation. Like the sum of 2 dates, or difference in days of 2 dates or something. Something different to the default sum it does with numbers Be free to disagree, but despite being a number internally, the user has decided that cell is a date and calc could detect the user decision and do something useful Calc just decided to show garbage (useless calculation) instead of something useful This is not a bug in the code, but a bug in usability and ui
Dates are internally time since epoch, so sum of dates does not make sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
>> Well, the bug is not about the sum not doing what its supposed to do, but >> about the status bar not showing a useful default value... >Dates are internally time since epoch, so sum of dates does not make sense As I said, I know the sum of the internal representation of 2 dates is useless. It should be removed, instead of showing something useless :) But we could actually show something useful there, like the difference of min and max dates... which is useful - ex.1: 2017-04-10 2017-04-02 2017-04-01 Shows 10 days - ex.2: 10:30 11:41 Shows 1h10' And theres probably a few other useful calculations you can do with dates If you want to discard it because is too difficult to implement with the current way cells works, okay, but at least acknowledge you are understanding what I mean with all this, because every reply makes me feel Im not making my point across :)
(In reply to pajaro from comment #5) > If you want to discard it because is too difficult to implement with the > current way cells works, okay, but at least acknowledge you are > understanding what I mean with all this, because every reply makes me feel > Im not making my point across :) I understand what you mean. I am just relaying answers from experienced Calc developers. The last one was from Kohei.
Okay, so I did get my point across but Kohei does not think is useful enough Now im at rest with this bug :)
Okay, so I did get my point across but Kohei does not think is useful enough Now im at rest with this bug :) Thanks for relaying the messages!