[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365insider...
If I then put 60/100 in cell A2, it doesn't do any conversion. Then put the formula "=Search("/", A1)" in cell B1 and copy that to cell B2, B1 evaluates to #VALUE! and B2 evaluates to 3.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
On german systems it's for example a semicolon, so a CSV is basically a "semicolon separated value" file, and there is no working solution around that...
Joel Spolsky mentions a more charitable take on this from Ed Fries:
> Lotus had to fit in 640K. That’s not a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That’s really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn’t matter to be wrong for those two months way in the past.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
You don't want to know how many phone numbers in various databases show up in exponential notation. Not gonna talk about it.
The root issue is that zipcodes though numeric in content (at least in the US) should not be treated as number (data type) but instead as a text (string) value
To tell Excel to treat this numeric data as a string you to either
* Precede the value with a single quote (') - Excel will treat the rest of the data as a string (and won't hide the leading zeros)
* Before entering the value set the format to TEXT which will tell Excel to take the entry verbatim with no inferring what the data represents (i.e. a number or date)
and I am not sure what the issue was , maybe it was leading 0 part because ending 0 part would be preserved , it happened like 2 years ago.
Also , I think the problem had actually been of libreoffice or whatever , oh yeah it was .00 , I wanted that .00 but it just removed it.
Like I said , I don't remember it. and I don't even remember how I fixed it , but I only remember the pain because it felt so simple yet it doesn't .... , I really wanted to use some python esq interface on something like libreoffice as well because my uncle had a pdf which had a column for the material code (like something like 1.1.2) and then it had a description and a name and I Had to copy material code from 1.1.2 and then paste it.
And he said that there was some other engineer in his department who had actually figured out where he would only type in 1.1.2 for example and on the next column, it would show up automatically , It was kind of crazy but I was thinking of creating a cloud service for such engineers which only had this (are there excel extensions ?) , or whatever because there are so many such engineers & my uncle would've definitely paid 10$ if it made his job easier since he always used to force some of us kids to do it for him. He just couldn't figure out how to do it himself and I don't blame him.
Unless you just want to keep that text as plain text, it's going to be doing some interpreting.
- 1.5
- CONV_ERR: invalid operator for type TEXT
It takes a very special mindset to do that, maybe the kind that comes from a junior MBA manager, for example ... and even then I find that farfetched.
It sounds more like one of those things that is observed, but some manager decided it is not high priority enough to fix right away. And then technical debt raises its ugly head.
1/2 I should never mean any kind of date, unless I'm entering it into a field that has already been declared a date field, or I have written that, then declared the field to be a date field.
Computers need to stop second guessing users.
Great Britain and its colonies (which included USA) did not change to Gregorian until 1752 and also to confuse more changed the date on when the year changed from March to 1st January.
If you are in Greece or Russia be even more aware as that will be around 1920 when they changed.
$ cal sept 1752
September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30The correct date for Easter was a huge deal in the early Church. The Pope brought Easter back into conformity with Nicaea by reforming the calendar -- astronomical knowledge had improved a lot over the centuries.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
But the program thw author is promoting says it does support dates before 1900.
I would worry what it does for dates between 1582 and 1753 in Anglo countries.
Basically you need to quote the date system as well as the date to get it correct. Even today there are countries not using Gregorian calendar.
I record dates as Julian days (or modified to not need a 32bit number) which is what Excel stores just using a different base date.
In precise-historian mode this makes sense, but otherwise people just don't care and count it as "gregorian days back".
<Reads the last paragraph>
Ooohhhhh it's an ad disguised as an article to bait people who don't use spreadsheet software into using their, "more intelligent" spreadsheet software. Okay.
This is just an ad for Quadratic, nothing more.
Related story from a few years ago: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
Except another reason to use Excel is the fairly low amount of programming knowledge you need. You can solve a lot of business requirements with a few point + click sums and averages, knowing how to fix parts of an equation while dragging and maybe some VLOOKUP as a stretch goal.
That is something excel does very well for many low-technical people.
Personally, I've found importing CSV and JSON files into postgres and working with views to export data tailor-made for excel visualizations to be a terrifying sweet spot of unholy and nasty power.
Why would you need to localize it there? I'm sure it's the Excel the user has is the one doing the localization, so I can email my French colleague an Excel file and the formula in B5 which is =SUM() on my machine will be =SOMME() on hers.
There's even sites for the dictionary of the function names, but googling "Excel french dictionary" gives you the top result that "That word in French is 'exceller'!"