511–518 of 518 posts
In a previous version of MS Excel, after opening a CSV file, Excel would silently write the 'interpreted' version to disk. So much trouble, simply from previewing a CSV.
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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-…
We have ISO 8601, no need to reinvent the wheel as a square.
https://xkcd.com/1179/ (date only)
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Your point is maybe a little obtuse to me, because it sounds like you are arguing for "computers are tools that should be learned, but really no one does and who can blame them, they just want to science" and simultaneously arguing, "tools aren't science, and science can be done without them". I feel like the later is obvious: of course the tools aren't science, but if you want to do real work and real science, your…
> Scientists can't reach a meaningful conclusion without proper use of tools. I'm just trying to make the point that "proper" is subjective. Software developers evaluate the quality of code according to how well it adheres to well-established coding practices, but those practices were established to address long-term issues like maintainability and security, not whether the software produces the right answer. You can…
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It's also behavior that goes back to the Ancient Times and predecessors such as Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Even ancient ones will tell you if you need to enter a thing and it has to be text and only text precede it with a quote mark, ie 'MARCH1, just as you would precede a formula with =. It's Spreadsheet 101 knowledge dating back many decades. The clickbait headline is fun, but the real headline is more like "Scienti…
> It's Spreadsheet 101 knowledge dating back many decades. Astounding, I've literally never heard of this in the 20 years or so I've been using spreadsheets. I'll be using it from now on!
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>"too complicated for simple tasks" How can Excel possibly be too complicated for simple tasks? It is pretty much as straightforward as it goes when it comes to grid-file viewing and editing. You can show it to anyone from a high-schooler to a 60 year old (with minimal experience on computers) colleagues and they will figure it out rather easily, good luck teaching Python/Pandas to the latter. >"not sophisticated eno…
> How can Excel possibly be too complicated for simple tasks? Excel is too complicated to send an e-mail for example. You can send e-mail from excel but it's much simpler to do in Outlook. Excel is too complicated for simple math = if you want to do 1024*436 it is better to fire up a calculator rather than wait for excel to start up.
You lose your history this way, while you can easily keep it in Excel.
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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-…
No, it does not take into account timezones. We have ISO 8601, no need to reinvent the wheel as a square. https://xkcd.com/1179/ (date only)
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You're taking a minor, very unusual issue that happens only to a subset of a subset of a subset of users and resolving it with regulation , while forgeting all the cases where Excel works perfectly for them. Libreoffice is good, but it has much more warts than Excel does and the presentantion capabilities (a key functionality) simply are not as good.
Are you seriously opposed to education because you see it as regulation? Also, I don't think it's a very minor issue if the tool you use to process your data, changes your data. It may only do that in limited cases, but the fact that it does it at all should alarm anyone who cares about data integrity.
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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.
What computer programmer can't handle locales? I mean that's 1st year comp programming 101 stuff. I've never had an issue. Sure I've had to fix other's work but it was usually old stuff that never knew it would be leaving the factory floor where it was being originally written, but still.