Calling a formula on union of two ranges

Question

I have some numbers in cells A1:A10 and some more numbers in B1:B7.

I want to run a function that takes a range (like IRR or SUM) such that it will operate on the concatenation of those two ranges. Is there a way in Google Spreadsheets to make such a call?

For SUM there is the obvious workaround SUM(A1:A10)+SUM(B1:B7), but this wouldn't do for a function like IRR.

Answer 1

=IRR( SPLIT ( JOIN(",", A1:A10, B1:B7), ",") )

Demo: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmyXqCqKRFBKdDZwUjdGSEk5ekp2VUxPb3ZjTllzZWc (to view the formula you have to make a copy)