this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
1713 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
59419 readers
5179 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Excel?! Have to respectfully disagree on that one.
What's wrong with excel?
It's an awful mix of half-assed approaches to things. Awkward syntax on everything and very poor at recognizing what types of data it is handling.
Open a CSV in a fresh Excel install. It will almost certainly mistake something for a date if the CSV is sufficiently large (unless the user is exceedingly explicit at changing settings for that particular CSV). It will reformat that data as a date, and as an added bonus, since Autosave is on by default, it'll save that reformatted data back into your CSV. Yes, settings can be changed to avoid these things. But why isn't it just designed better so as to avoid it altogether?
If that was just a natural side effect of spreadsheet apps, I could understand it. But LibreOffice Calc is a million times better at recognizing what types of data it is handling, so it seems to just be Excel's shittiness.
The fact that it also hasn't really changed beyond aesthetics since 2004 is just... wild.
Can confirm. I've sent csv files to my coworkers, and they've tried to tell me that the files I sent were invalid. It's because they opened up the file in Excel to look at it first, and Excel autosaved the reformatted data.