If you think the insanity stops here - you haven't heard of February 29th, 1900
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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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.
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Look, a date!
Always put a ' in front of any information in Excel you do not want changed
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
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As someone from Spain, excel decimals are the bane of my fucking existence
You can change whole row/columns to a different number default to stop it.
Make it assume decimals, dollars, dates, even SSN formats.
You can format cells to do any number of crazy things, but damned if I don't occasionally run into something that simply refuses to take my setting.
Sometimes you have to save and close to show Excel you mean business...
It's a dominance thing
Silly me went and learned VBA code to make excel work right. … and whose idea was it to have default paste, paste the format?!? When has anyone EVER wanted a table filled with different sizes and colors and fonts. Make the formatted paste the ctrl-shift-v if you want that so bad. JfC. Am i not being rational? Because this gets me HEATED.
Pasting with format as default is one of the biggest mistakes of humanity. I can’t remember a single situation in all my life that I needed this.
My favorite is writing an email, copy&pasting a name and send it to the person. Only to discover later (on a different device) that your stupid email program pasted with format without actually showing it to you. And your mail looks like some moron played with the format settings.
I want NAMES!!
My god, I was just using a reference table on another sheet to drive a few columns of data in my first sheet (basically a color hex code in the main sheet that would match a code in the reference table and return the color name in one column and a part size in the next one) and for some unknown reason, 3 rows of the reference table were causing an N/A (value not found) error in the first sheet.
I checked every variable I could think of and nothing was solving the issue.
Finally tried literally retyping the same damn value in the cell and it instantly fixed the issue. There weren't any extra spaces, format never changed...it just really needed me to retype it.
Interesting. What SSN would you use though, as an example? What would the numbers be?
123456789 to 123-45-6789
Like that?
Lol no. I was being silly, acting like I wanted thier ssn.
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 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"
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.
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.
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MM/DD/YYYY detected. Burn it with fire!
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.
I'd argue excel is one of their better products. Still with a LOT of annoying little quirks, but nonetheless extremely useful.
The complaint about date formatting is a skill issue, and this particular post I enjoy and makes me chuckle whenever I see it because sometimes it can get it wrong, but it would never get 12.5 wrong unless you manually have formatted it as a date and not General.
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.