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SoftMaker's PlanMaker: cannot handle linked workbooks with SUMIF and Google Drive reckons the files are ZIP files.

I have tested PlanMaker with my now-standard test suite of two linked workbooks.

PlanMaker looks and feels highly compatible with Excel.  It has comparable menu structures, a choice of Excel 2003-like or Excel 2007-like interfaces.  It feels tight and secure, i.e. no risk of data being lost.

So it should have been an ideal candidate to solve the problems unsolved by LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

Sadly, no.  It seems that PlanMaker's deployment of XLSX does not extend to linked workbooks in functions SUMIF and SUMIFS.  PlanMaker thus cannot pass this most basic of hygiene factors.

Naturally, I put in a comment in PlanMaker's forum for PlanMaker Freeware in Sep2018 and received no useful replies.

And now I receive spam from PlanMaker.

One other thing that PlanMaker annoyingly does.  When it saves XLSX, it does something that makes Google Drive think it is a ZIP file.  Google Drive preview thus cannot open the file for preview ("Oops!  Something's gone wrong!  You can download the file instead...").  Given that PlanMaker doesn't intend to take ownership of the SUMIF issue, I decided there was no point in telling them about another elementary mistake that smells an awful lot like non-compliance with Microsoft's XLSX standards.

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