[flagged]
Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year
21–30 of 36 posts
Re: Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year
#22Excel is so embedded into our world that we renamed part of the human genome to prevent excel from incorrectly reading them as dates
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
Re: Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year
#23> If this behavior were to be corrected, many problems would arise, including:
> Almost all dates in current Microsoft Excel worksheets and other documents would be decreased by one day.
Unless your fix adds a day to make them stay the same??
And these silly "compatibility" excuses are begins bugs affecting more and more unsuspecting users like that gene import conversion bug affecting a quarter of all published gene research papers.
Re: Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, that's nowhere near as daft as september, october, november, december. Latin for seven, eight, nine, and ten is: septem, octem, novem, decem. Those are the nineth, 10th, 11th and 12th months. Edit: Whoops, correct eng -> latin nums
No? How is it octem and not octo? Does the flat bar accent do something? >The Latin word for "eight" is octō. [0] [0] asked google
And indeclinable.
Re: Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year
#25I learned about this from my Macintosh back in The Day™, when a dead Parameter RAM battery would reset the system date to January 1st, 1904 at every boot:
- https://spinsidemacintosh.neocities.org/im202#im033-001
> “The date and time setting is also copied at system startup from the clock chip into its own low-memory location. It’s stored as a number of seconds since midnight, January 1, 1904, and is updated every second. The maximum value, $FFFFFFFF, corresponds to 6:28:15 AM, February 6, 2040; after that, it wraps around to midnight, January 1, 1904.”
- https://archive.org/details/mac_Macworld_Mac_Secrets_5th_Edi...
- http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_26/minow....
Re: Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year
#26I was developing an interface to read a .xslx file to import a table within a Qt/C++ program, and this detailed showed up in my conversions to Unix time. It turns out Claude was amazing and brought up this issue as soon as Excel was mentioned, but terrible at actually fixing up the calculations.
I'd prefer using a .csv with dates already converted to Unix time, but no luck convincing the other people involved.
Re: Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year
#27Excel is so embedded into our world that we renamed part of the human genome to prevent excel from incorrectly reading them as dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
Re: Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, that's nowhere near as daft as september, october, november, december. Latin for seven, eight, nine, and ten is: septem, octem, novem, decem. Those are the nineth, 10th, 11th and 12th months. Edit: Whoops, correct eng -> latin nums
"I hate that SEPTember OCTOber NOVember and DECember aren't the7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months." "Whoever f---ed this up should be stabbed." "I have excellent news for you."
We named the eighth month after a guy whose name was Eight, but October was taken so we called it August instead.
Re: Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year
#29This obligates me to share this absolute gem of date/time history folklore: https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/an-extended-history-of-t...
Awesome.
This is from before ChatGPT or Google were around. So this person either knew their stuff or typed it up from an encyclopedia...
Re: Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which wouldn't be that weird, except that the earliest Roman calendar started in March and ended in December, having only 10 months! The Romans were of course well aware that this left a gap of about two months between the end of one year in December, and the beginning of the next year in March. But they just didn't bother counting this period as part of the calendar year. Presumably because there was no agricultural…
Numa did try to name and consolidate the winter months, but it wasn't very popular. The months were for productive seasons, winter for everything else.
Also French revolutionaries ;-)