[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 116744] New: Cloud-connected data types

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116744

            Bug ID: 116744
           Summary: Cloud-connected data types
           Product: LibreOffice
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Keywords: needsDevEval, needsUXEval
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: medium
         Component: Calc
          Assignee: libreoffice-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
          Reporter: tietze.heiko at gmail.com
                CC: libreoffice-ux-advise at lists.freedesktop.org

Microsoft recently announced [1] this new "data type", which is actually a
connection between input in Excel and the proprietary "knowledge graph", and
users start to ask for equivalents [2] (the MS posting was prior to 1st of
April).

The user stories are like this

* Eve enters "Country" in cell A1 (and some countries below like USA, Canada,
Spain, Japan...) and "Population" in cell B1 expecting the function to retrieve
the values from an external source.
* Eve takes names and addresses of her customers and wants to retrieve the
current area codes from an external source.
* Eve enters "Year" in A1 (and 2018..2010 below) and "Football Champion" in B1
and expects the winning teams of her country.
* Eve enters "Element" in A1 and expects a dropdown list of external
information in B1 where she can choose "Molecular Mass".
* Eve wants to know where exactly the external data come from and on what basis
it was collected.

(Dynamical data like stock value or exchange rates are a different type of
information.)

In terms of open source such a feature would be a query to Wikidata (the
sidebar facts at Wikipedia), or any other open and transparent data provider,
which is technically pretty simple. The challenge is to get the right data out
of the external source accepting fuzzy input (like USA instead of United States
of America, or to understand Element as Chemical Element) and the interesting
information itself (the prioritization of locale information in the second
example is artificially).

I think such a function goes beyond the actual scope and should be implemented
as an extension. But that's up for discussion as such data retrieval with full
transparency would be a killer feature.

[1]
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Excel-Blog/Preview-of-Stocks-and-Geography-New-Data-Types-in-Excel/ba-p/176185
[2]
http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/quot-Microsoft-Excel-Is-Going-Beyond-Text-and-Numbers-quot-tt4236894.html

PS: The feature is compared with Lotus Improv [3] and Jvelin [4] but I cannot
follow this derivation idea.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_Software

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