161–170 of 518 posts
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...)
Back down? Or pick a better tool. If Excel proves to be an unreliable tool for your job, use a better one. Alternatives exist, ranging from Google Docs, and LibreOffice, to simpler light-weight spreadsheets. Or possibly more specialist tools.
Why does everything always have to be put in Excel if Excel is such a poor tool for so many things?
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...)
There are dozens of auto-formatting "features" that piss me off each and every day across all of Microsoft's products.
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Having Excel be the default for .csv files has caused me problems in the past as well with Excel automatically changing data when you open it. The unfortunate thing I have come across multiple times is a csv file that has some values with a lot of significant figures, i.e. 123456789876, 987654321234 After opening in Excel it will convert these to: 1.23E+11, 9.87E+11 Then resaving the file (as a csv) will store the va…
Same here, but with IMEI numbers. Excel silently truncates them, it’s frustrating. Why can’t the auto format detect and just store them in text format?
To people asking, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?" The whole world's data ultimately comes from or ends up in an Excel spreadsheet. Sure, we might use other intermediate data storage methods, but in the end it's going to go into some scientist's or some politician's computer, and by golly it's gonna be in Excel. Trying to rally against Excel is like trying to rally ag…
To people asking, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?" The whole world's data ultimately comes from or ends up in an Excel spreadsheet. Sure, we might use other intermediate data storage methods, but in the end it's going to go into some scientist's or some politician's computer, and by golly it's gonna be in Excel. Trying to rally against Excel is like trying to rally ag…
To people asking, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?" The whole world's data ultimately comes from or ends up in an Excel spreadsheet. Sure, we might use other intermediate data storage methods, but in the end it's going to go into some scientist's or some politician's computer, and by golly it's gonna be in Excel. Trying to rally against Excel is like trying to rally ag…
This accords with my experience. When I worked in clinical trial design/analysis, no one did their analyses in excel, but for initial data formatting and clean-up? /everything/ went through excel, even if the final cleanup was a python script. You’re not going to have the same ease of eyeballing your data in SPSS or SAS or R.
I would say R is a lot more useful for a quick check on whether all columns have one data structure, contain NaN/NA's, are of equal length, etc.
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Yes, and? It should be a simple checklist item for any scientific journal to ask the author whether they used excel or not. If they say yes, reject the paper unless they can show their work hasn't been affected negatively by using excel.
That doesn't solve the analysis problem downstream when a non-expert is getting started, doesn't know about Excel's anti-features, and starts doing analysis using the only tool that the world has ever told them is acceptable for tabular data. Ideally excel would change, but since we know it won't, and we want to work with lots of people with minimal problems, we must adapt.
Researchers should use other, more appropriate tools, or at the very least specify the column type when importing data into Excel. It's not that hard.
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...)
Programmers love to complain about Excel, but we happily use YAML, which has essentially the same footgun: certain strings (like 'on') need quoting if you don't want it to interpret them as something else.