431–440 of 518 posts
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Do they change the data or only the representation? Several people here argued that LibreOffice preserved the original data, which would be a pretty fundamental difference in this context.
SEPT-2 is changed to date (that is how all major spreadsheet software works if an input is accepted as date), SEPT2 is kept as text as entered.
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You can't force people to use a different tool that they don't want to use. They [(computational) biologists] know other tools pretty well, they don't want to use them. If you want to help, work on better tools for them, based on their needs. Regulation is about the worst thing you could've thought of. If you said this to my gf's research group, they would yell at you, Excel is a loved piece of software among them, a…
Where am I talking about forcing them? You're the only one bringing that up, and I strongly disagree with it. Education is not force, it's empowering. The only reason they want to use a tool that doesn't really fit their use case, is because they're not aware of better tools. I find it very hard to believe that scientists actually want to use a tool that corrupts their data. If that is true, then that is absolutely a…
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I don't even know why anyone still uses this notation in today's connected world. 2020-08-06 is ideal. Russian standard (06.08.2020) is uglier (digits are not sorted by significance) but still unambiguous. But that slash horror? Why would anyone continue inflicting this on themselves and their peers!?
yes, YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS is the only proper format. It is sorted from the greatest unit (year) to the smallest unit (second). If you treat them as text and sort alphabetically they still get sorted from oldest to newest. Other formats don't sort properly. writing dd.mm.yyyy is like writing time ss:mm:hh writing mm/dd/yyyy is like writing time mm/ss/hh If I really have to put YYYY at the end of the date I use the 'dd-…
It's honestly amazing that Excel hasn't fixed this issue. It's pisses off an enormous number of users especially in basically any non-US country (even if 01/02 is a date, it isn't the second of January in most of the world...)
Excel is stuck. It can't change this behavior if it cares about backwards compatibility. There are uncountably many recorded macros and all sorts of scripts and data tools everywhere, that implicitly and inadvertently depend on behavior like this. Like Javascript's warts, you have to declare these as features and live with them. Of course Microsoft has thought about this, it's silly to think they never have and we're…
They could easily make it an optional behaviour.
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I keep seeing this sentiment when it comes to those in the natural sciences, but it makes no sense. I could replace "programming" in your above little bit with "mathematics" and it would be just as weird. Our modern world runs on computers and programs, just as our modern world and modern science built itself on mathematics and required many to use it. So too the new world of science may require everyone to know to p…
Think of the flip side: Programmers are terrible biologists. Sure, it would be great if we all had more time to learn how to code. Coding is important. But I'd say the onus should be on coders to build better tools and documentation so they are empowering people to do something other than code, rather than reduce everything to a coding exercise because making everything look like code means less boring documentation…
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I'd say that in general, we need to get rid of locales in computing. They're an unending source of bugs and annoyances. It's not "techies know best" whining. We've been increasingly computerizing the economy for the past 50+ years; it's past time for societies to adapt to that reality, instead of wasting time and money on dealing with dozens of date formats, number separators, currency notations, etc.
We are going to get rid of locales as much as we are going to get rid of local languages, tradition and culture. The US switched to the metric system in the 60s and there is a shitload of benefits in doing so. Has it worked? Not really. Still using the old system everywhere. So the solution cannot be to get rid of locales, but to actually use them properly: - Always use the right locale for the job (the OS or browser…
Furthermore, I would argue that the very notion of user locale based localization by default is misguided, since it is fundamentally no different from automatic translation of content based on the users' UI language setting. It is a form of misrepresenting the content, though with things like dates you usually don't lose much information in the process.
Excel is an amazing tool. But it also has some significant shortcomings: * A well known tendency to mangle date and gene data under the guide of being 'helpful'. * Easy to making mistakes when cutting and pasting cells. * Difficult to see what is going on in a spreadsheet. * Poor handling of CSV files. Some of these shortcoming are inherent to spreadsheets. Others are specific to Excel, but hard to overcome due to th…
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imagine if they worked with the industry to build in a set of relatively agreed upon defaults, like turning autoformat off for dates that matched a critera. then geneticists could activate the geneticist profile and excel works as they'd expect. if they encountered a file that broke, they could turn that profile off. that's a fairly sophisticated solution, but it's just one of many potential approaches to fixing the…
It would be way less effort to have the same exact program under a completely new name. MS Excel MS (names are harder than I thought / remembered) Matrix In the back-end they'd use the same sanity and share 99% of the code, but Excel would add in the cruft / warts compatibility quirks.