Bug 105811

Summary: Enhancement to CELL() function
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: Don Edwards <donedwards111>
Component: CalcAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: NEW ---    
Severity: enhancement Keywords: needsDevAdvice
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature: Regression By:
Bug Depends on:    
Bug Blocks: 108827    

Description Don Edwards 2017-02-06 22:24:20 UTC
What I really want is to be able to pass cell ranges (as opposed to the contents copied into arrays) around freely between Calc and Basic - but that would raise HUGE backward-compatibility issues, so I'm quite confident it won't happen.

(Before I switched to Linux I had rewritten a number of Excel's built-in functions that return the value of a cell, to instead return the cell.)

As a second choice, can the spreadsheet Cell() function be extended - or another function created - that will take a cell or range</b> and return its full name as a string? I don't want to just type the string, because =SomeFunctionOf(Cell("Range",A1:C5)) is a reference to the indicated cells and will be re-called if anything in the range changes; =SomeFunctionOf("Sheet1.A1:C5") is not.

Cell("Address",C5) does this but only for cells, not ranges, and won't include filename or sheetname unless they are included in the function call. A macro needs this information as well.
Comment 1 Carlos 2017-04-03 18:36:21 UTC
We need another function (to avoid causing incompatibilities with MS Excel), that works like the CELL function but accepts ranges or cell as the second argument. 
Perhaps it can be called RANGE. 

Perhaps not all InfoType will be relevant:
  *  CONTENTS
  *  TYPE
  *  WIDTH
  *  PREFIX
  *  PROTECT
  *  FORMAT
  *  COLOR
  *  PARENTHESES
  *  CONTENTS

I have set the bug's status to 'NEW'.