The current rules for SpreadSheet plugin state

• Formulae can only reference cells in the current or preceding row of the current table; they may not reference cells below the current table row
• Formulae can also be placed outside of tables; they can reference cells in the preceding table

It would be very useful if SpreadSheet plugin could reference a specific table.

As a suggestion, Spreadsheet use a table parameter in the way that Extensions/ChartPlugin does. Or it could use a name parameter in the same way.

From Extensions/ChartPlugin:

table     Foswiki table used to build the chart. A numerical value refers to the table number, where "1" is the first table seen in a topic. Any other non-numeric string refers to a named table defined by the TABLE variable with a name parameter. For example, table="trends" refers to the table that is preceded by %TABLE{ name="trends" }%. 

Given that this code is already present in ChartPlugin, copying it to SpreadSheet might be relatively simple (and we'd have some consistency of usage).

I frequently want to refer to cells of table A from within table B (e.g. combining cells from two tables into a third table.) The only way to do this now is to manually SET and GET a lot of variables.

-- VickiBrown - 17 Aug 2011