Wed 20 Jul 2005 12:12:47 PM UTC, original submission:
The palette of columns offered for supplemental reports is not
yet ideal. Some columns aren't valid. All could be named better.
Other columns would no doubt be useful. Users ought to be able
to store column selections and reload them by name. More than
one supplemental report per illustration should be allowed.
New columns might be functions of existing columns, e.g., simple
arithmetic (C0 + C1 - C2), or the IRR of column C0 versus C1. It
is important to consider whether such columns should be calculated:
- always, in C++; but that would require more RAM for every
cell,and IRRs in particular are expensive to calculate;
- on demand, in C++, which is probably best, but requires
careful design; or
- on demand, in xsl stylesheets; but that would probably be
slower than C++ and less accurate (because operand columns
are rounded before xsl sees them), and it's certainly wrong
to calculate IRRs in stylesheets.
A GUI to design such additional columns would be ideal, but
far more ambitious than a menu of predefined columns.
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