Cell Attributes

Cells can have several attributes:

• A cell label, which is useful because it avoids the need to directly address cells by their position, and because it continues to work if the cell is moved or if parts of the spreadsheet are inserted or deleted. A cell label must be different from any of the function names (see the list in 7.3).
• A “style,” which controls the visual appearance of the value of the cell on screen as well as in presentation output formats such as formatted text, L^ATEX, html, etc. Styles are addressed more fully in the next subsection.
• A flag indicating whether the cell is “locked.”
• A flag indicating whether the cell is “ignored.”

In addition, each column has a width.

Label

This operation lets you edit the cell label of the current cell. Further it changes all occurences of it in the cell contents to the new value, unless you erased the cell label. If a block has been marked at the time you edit the cell label, all occurences of the label in contents of cells in that block will be changed (rather than in the entire sheet). Once a cell is labeled, an occurrence of that label in any expression will evaluate to the (current) location of the cell.

Lock

You can lock cells to protect them from accidental editing. Note that this protects you from modifying single cells. If you modify a block of cells which contains locked cells, those will be modified as well. Therefore, use extra caution in applying block commands.

Ignore

Ignored cells will be completely ignored. They appear as empty cells on screen and during calculations. This is useful for temporarily disabling parts of your calculation, as the former content reappears when the ignore flag is removed again.

Column Width

The column width only affects the screen display, not the formatting of the final output (except in the case of formatted text files). It is intended to let you make better usage of the screen for more overview. If the width is too small to display the cell value, a placeholder will be displayed.