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Does libreoffice calc have special numbers corresponding to -infinity and infinity similar to python's numpy?

They would obey rules like:

x = some number
infinity + x = infinity
-infinity + x = -infinity

It would be handy sometimes to return such objects from functions.

drevicko
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2 Answers2

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There's no mention of it in the documentation, so I'm assuming there's no concept of infinity in LibreOffice.

The only relevant forum post I could find shows that, even though IEEE floating point supports +/-Infinity special values, OpenOffice (and probably LibreOffice) apparently doesn't.

efotinis
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2

There's no number to represent infinity as such. The largest number LibreOffice recognises is apparently 1.79769313486232E+308 (I entered 1E999 into a c ell and that's what was stored). You could enter 1E999, or this number, or define a Name "Infinity" with this or another suitable value. I did a calculation with the maximum vale, and got an error cell "#NUM!", so maybe a not-so-high value would be more useful in some cases, 1E300 worked in my particular case. Too late for the original questioner I suppose, maybe useful to googlers like me.

MichaelS
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    PS: in another forum the question was asked "why would you want an infinity value?". In my case I was doing calculations on an electrical RLC network; it was convenient to set a C value to infinity for RL only. Just a crude working spreadsheet, not a proper one with exception-handling, etc. – MichaelS Apr 27 '14 at 09:53
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    That wouldn't work too well though. If you multiply it by, say .005 it's no longer your 'infinity'. Infinity behaves quite differently to an actual number (eg: x*infinity = x+infinity = infinity, x/infinity = 0 and infinity/infinity = NaN). Using some finite number as a proxy will mean you're never quite sure if a number is just large or actually infinite. – drevicko Apr 27 '14 at 10:08