The current Formula Specification and OOo implementation thereof have a very weak support for strings. Even fundamental string functions are lacking This makes the use of ODF a poor choice for many research fields, where a lot of the data is in text format.

I especially miss the following functions: 1.) an extension to FIND() and SEARCH() that returns '0' IF string is NOT found, instead of the '#NA!" (greatly eases work with complex searches) 2.) count number of occurrences of a substring within a string, e.g. COUNTSUBSTR("I11.0; E11.5; I25.5", "I") = 2 3.) SPLIT string into substrings => perform operations on the substrings SPLIT("I11.0; E11.5; I25.5", ";", IGNORE = " \n\t", SORT = TRUE) returns an array("E11.5", "I11.0", "I25.5") SPLIT("I11.0; E11.5; I25.5", ";", IGNORE = " \n\t", SORT = TRUE, pos = 1) returns "E11.5" SPLIT("I11.0; E11.5; I25.5", ";", IGNORE = " \n\t", RETURN_NUMBER = TRUE) returns (int) "3" ...

For many more examples, see any text-oriented programing language.

Sincerely,