Re: [office-formula] Who's doing what this week, Redux (including a requestto Stefan Nikolas)

The existing function deals with whole
days. Excel explicitly defines it that way.   Even if you give it
a date serial number that is noon one day to 5pm another day, it will not
return a fractional number of workdays.  I'm not suggesting we expand
it to include such a feature.

My interest was purely in the internationalization
aspect, that the legal definition of the work week in some nations is not
M-F.

So, we handle it by simply adding an
optional enumeration value which defines what a weekend is.  0 (default)
= Sat/Sun, 1=Thurs/Friday and 2=Friday/Sat.

If we wanted the full generality, we
could have instead an optional array parameter of 7 values, evaluated as
booleans for whether that day of the week is a weekend or not.  That
has the advantage of working for partial week schedules as well as 1-day
weekends.

-Rob

 ___________________________

Rob Weir

Software Architect

Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software

IBM Software Group

email: 

phone: 1-978-399-7122

blog: http://www.robweir.com/blog/

"David A. Wheeler"
<> 

02/14/2007 01:36 PM

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Re: [office-formula] Who's doing what
this week, Redux (including a request to Stefan Nikolas)

David A. Wheeler wrote:

> > Robert Weir has volunteered to do NETWORKDAYS and WORKDAY, since
they

> > have the same I18N issues.  Basically, he's going to need
to add an

> > additional optional parameter to handle internationalization

Eike Rathke responded:

> If we add a parameter that no application is supporintg yet I suggest
to

> define it the way that if the parameter is not given comply with the

> Ecma/Excel definition. Eases interoperability.

Oh, absolutely, that was the reason I want it optional.  Sorry I didn't
make that clear.  It's really not just Ecma/Excel; I think everyone
does it the same way.

> > - not EVERYONE's weekend is Saturday/Sunday.  I see two
major options:

> > (1) a parameter saying which day of the week begins a two-day
weekend,

> > or

...

> > (2) a parameter that's a boolean representation of the days of
the

> > week that are to be considered non-workdays.  Option #2
is more

> > flexible, but also is harder to implement and explain... does
anyone

> > care which way he goes?

> 

Eike adds a #3:

> It may also be necessary to include half days, as in "Saturday
is half

> day off, Sunday one day". The most flexible IMHO would be to
have an

> array with a factor in the range [0,1] for each weekday, if that's
not

> considered overkill.

Eek.  Actually, you can even pile on the overkill further; many people
in the U.S. work in 2-week cycles, so they work 5 days one week and 4 days
in the alternate week.  That would add yet another option:

#4: The new optional parameter accepts an array; if 14 days instead of
7, it that describes a two-week cycle.

I think #3 and #4 are more flexible but would be much harder to use.  You
could partly address that yet another option:

#5: Merge #2, #3, #4. Basically, detect if the new parameter is a scalar
number, and if so, interpret as #2. If the new param is array/multi-cell
range, then interpret as #3 or #4 (depending on its length).  That
might make common cases easier to use, and still be very flexible - but
it's more work to implement.

I have to admit that #3, #4, and #5 seem awfully like overkill to me. Does
anyone have an opinion on what is best for our purposes?

--- David A. Wheeler