As a member of the Documentation Team, I have been investigating how we can improve the documentation associated with Calc's 500+ functions.

I have noted that there is an inconsistency across the help files with regards to defining the syntax of a function call. In most cases the basic syntax is expressed as the name of the function, followed by an open round bracket, followed by a list of the parameter names separated by semi-colons, followed by a close round bracket. For example:
- NOW()
- ABS(Number)
- ATAN2(NumberX; NumberY)
There are a small number of function-related help topics which omit any such information but I will raise a separate bug to cover these.

This basic syntax works well and is, I believe, helpful for the user. However some help topics extend this syntax to place square brackets around the names of optional parameters (examples of such functions include AGGREGATE, SUMIFS, FORECAST.ETS.PI.MULT, SWITCH, GETPIVOTDATA). Other help topics which do not adopt this approach usually state the nature of the parameter (required or optional) in its associated text description - there are however cases in which no statement is made.

I feel that consistency would be highly desirable and so it would be better if we adopted a consistent approach to syntax specification across all help topics for Calc's functions. My preferred option would be to update the help files as necessary to use the square brackets throughout (even if the associated text already states that a parameter is optional). The square brackets approach provides information at a glance, without visually searching through text.

I realize that there would be significant work to rationalize this across the help files but I volunteer to do it (subject only to Olivier Hallot finding time to provide me with a tutorial on the mechanics of editing file files!).