this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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Look, a date!
Always put a ' in front of any information in Excel you do not want changed
If you think the insanity stops here - you haven't heard of February 29th, 1900
Very interesting! I never knew about years like 1900 (or other century years that aren't divisible by 400) not being leap years. TIL!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/determine-a-leap-year
Excel preserves this bug deliberately to maintain compatibility with spreadsheets that were produced with Lotus 1-2-3, a program which no one cares about anymore, with the only consequence of fixing it being that all of those companies and corporations with bugged worksheets will have to update their dates just once.
But Microsoft is adamant about Excel preserving all of its legacy jank specifically so it will not break equally janky spreadsheets that some absurd number of businesses rely upon for their daily operations, and without which much of the Western world would apparently collapse into a quivering heap. Or so it is feared, anyway.
The absolute refusal to change anything is how Excel got where it is today. Businesses and workers alike would shit if they rolled into work one day and Excel was behaving differently.
It's not simply a matter of updating sheets now and again, it's a matter of trust. If Excel was constantly (or ever) evolving, how do you trust it's output?
Oh no, it would force businesses to legitimize their currently half-assed spreadsheet-as-application nonsense.
Asking billion-dollar industries to use proper programming languages, or to use decent version control and configuration management, or at least just to fucking document the particular environment a workflow uses (e.g. the version of Excel the spreadsheet is intended to run in) so that it can be reproducible, is obviously completely unreasonable!
Yeah, I'm sure your bakery's software dev. team is just too lazy to develop proper software.
If the bakery is doing something so complicated with Excel that they'd be screwed if Microsoft fixed the bugs in it, then they should have a dev team!
From what I've seen done in spread sheets, I'm convinced a major change in Exel could cause global anarchy.
Phyllis in accounting would have a bird. Someone would probably wind up murdered with a staple puller.
Phyllis is in Sales though. I think you mean Oscar
Even "better": https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates
The renaming is based on a meta study that found that about 20% of all studies involving these genes had errors traced back to excel converting them to dates.
Some code piled up in there over the years.
If I remember correctly Microsoft once responded saying that it can in fact not turn off that feature in Excel. Excel will always interpret your input and change it to what it thinks is correct
It's always been possible to format a range before inputting data. It won't be interpreted that way.
It only does that when it's formatet as "General" aka "Nobody knows what the fuck I'm about to do".
It would probably be more beneficial to change the default format to something else.
It only does that when it's formatet as "General" aka "Nobody knows what the fuck I'm about to do".
How about handling that as plain text?
Edit: wait, table calculation, what did i think? Well, i hadn't slebt much or good the last few days and 12 hours now, so there.
Then select Format > Text
Would be pretty annoying for numbers
Format as number then.
Maybe numbers shouldn't be a special case, but should be the default for software meant to handle tables if numbers
It would probably be more beneficial to change the default format to something else.
AfaIk this is not possible. Or MS doesn't allow it. User Defined would be pretty useless if MS would simply stop interpretating what I want to do in general
function validate(val)
try:
cast val as numeric
except:
print "Oops, not a number"
cast val as general ## date or whatever
end
validate(12.5) ## returns 12.5
validate("12.5") ## returns 12.5
validate("12 . 5") ## returns a date maybe
Oh my god what cursed Python, Lua, and SQL offshoot is this
It's my own grammar, "Luanatic"
I mean, MS should change the default.
As a user, the only way currently is to make a template document and use that as a default when creating a new book.
You most certainly can. You can set the format of a cell, and if its set to number 12.5 will be 12.5, it wont even try date formats...
they're talking about defaults, as in when you create a new file the first thing you do is type a number and not get interpreted as a date.
Try opening a sheet sent by a Spaniard colleague. Good luck with decimals.
Thats a locale issues that excel has and cant fix ( for compatibility reasons ). Its one of the reasons i hate excel haha. But not related to cell types
No, I know. I can fix it, but old sheets and stubborn colleagues and clients and my fucking grandma won't.
My point was more related with excel manipulating input incorrectly because of Unspecified.
Excel makes some crazy assumptions with dates but....it doesn't get confused about decimals. I just tried 12.5, 1900.12.5, and 5.12.1900 but none converted to dates
The worst culprit for me are the alphanumerical employee codes like "MARC4"
Is that the code for the employee who rats out your stash?
Yeahhhh I've had similar things happen with device SKUs! It gets confused with letters a lot
As someone from Spain, excel decimals are the bane of my fucking existence
MM/DD/YYYY detected. Burn it with fire!
This but with goddamn scientific notation.
That and sometimes the answer to fixing it is simply selecting the cell, not changing a thing, and hitting enter.
Yep, I hate that Excel doesn't open CSV files and treat every cell as "Text" considering that's how a CSV stores the data. It loves to convert to scientific notation, or omit leading zeros, or omit trailing zeros on a decimal, or assume something is a date. I always have to update csv files to .txt instead and then import it via the wizard and manually select Text for all columns.
The fix to this problem that the entire world complains about but doesn't bother googling is like, 3 clicks total in 99% of cases.
To be fair, it's a lot of work if 99% of the entire world needs to click 3 times.
I sometimes wonder if Microsoft is deliberately making a shit product just to keep people employed.