Rather than start a new topic each time, I figure one topic with a
dialog might prevent cluttering up the main page with lots of topics.

Naturally, the list owners can decide otherwise.

I'll start with a simple one: I want to do a substring check.

Does calculate allow for substring checks? In my case, I want to
check the first 4 characters of a value against a known value, and
have the result be basically "true" or "false".

More generically, does calculate allow non-numeric (i.e. string)
operations like substring and concatenation? If not, would that be a
good addition?

Thanks.