Merging Calc's label range functionality with named range.

[Kohei Yoshida]

Hi there,

I'd like to merge Calc's label range functionality (which you can find 
in the menu at Insert - Names - Labels) with named range functionality. 
The named range functionality is found at Insert - Names - 
Define/Manage/Insert. Also, the Create menu item in the same menu 
sub-tree is also a part of the named range functionality.Here, what I 
basically mean by "merging" is to remove this functionality and provide 
some rudimentary mapping to the named range when importing legacy 
documents that use this functionality.

What the label ranges provide can be pretty much achieved by named 
ranges, and with named ranges you can do much much more. The UI for 
label ranges is very clunky, unattractive, and hard to use.  Rather than 
trying to maintain and improve this almost duplicated functionality, we 
should just drop it and encourage users to use named ranges instead.  
Dropping this functionality would also help clean up the implementation 
and make it easier for us to improve the formula engine going forward. 
So, I would passionately love to see that happensince the presence of 
this functionality currently is making it harder to maintain the formula 
engine code, much less improve it.

Excel also had similar functionality but dropped it in Excel 2007, and 
steered the users toward using named ranges. So, there is no concerns 
with regard to interoperabilityeither.

Best,

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice Calc hacker, SUSE.