Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends if you have American dates or normal dates, I guess
Only HN readership might take an iso order as normal I guess :D
Apart from Scandinavia, Japan, and a few other places.
Cursed Excel: "1/2"+1=45660
31–40 of 144 posts
Re: Cursed Excel: "1/2"+1=45660
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does it then work if I send the file to others. Is it saved in the file or will it just crash there?
The others may have their own preferences to edit documents. It's like you edited one code file in a project, and you want everyone to switch to night IDE theme when they open that particular file.
The meaning of a value (data type in programming lingo) is not a preference because it is objective, not subjective. It depends on the cell being displayed, not on the viewer in front of the screen.
Re: Cursed Excel: "1/2"+1=45660
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
ISO order is the correct order. 2025 April 7 or 2025-04-07 or whatever. Human-read numbers are big endian and dates should be big endian to maintain that consistency. Also, America uses ISO order, we just use a comma. 2025 April 7 is the same as April 7, 2025. Just like Bill Gates is the same as Gates, Bill.
in my country you read and speak numbers 97 like 'seven and ninety'. this is normal.. :p aslong as we dont base our endianess on how french pronounce or read nrs i think we can work with it. that being said, i am for ISO notation if you want to order something in a list. year, month, day seems logical in this case as it will easily sort chronologically. i dont see another real reason why one would be better than anot…
> aslong as we dont base our endianess on how french pronounce or read
If you're annoyed by French numbers (which come from Gauls counting in 20s) try numbers in Danish.
Re: Cursed Excel: "1/2"+1=45660
#34I've never understood why they don't let you turn off automatic date parsing. That one feature has caused me more grief than anything else in Excel.
This is supported in Excel. Select options > Data > Automatic Data Conversions > untick the boxes.
Fun fact: This setting is only available since End of 2023 [0]
[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365insider...
Re: Cursed Excel: "1/2"+1=45660
#35I wish Libreoffice didn't support all this legacy weirdness.
Re: Cursed Excel: "1/2"+1=45660
#36I've never understood why they don't let you turn off automatic date parsing. That one feature has caused me more grief than anything else in Excel.
This is supported in Excel. Select options > Data > Automatic Data Conversions > untick the boxes.
It's not working for me. I have those all unticked but if I create a new file and go to cell A1 and type 1/2, it puts 2-Jan in the cell rather than the text I want.
If I then put 60/100 in cell A2, it doesn't do any conversion. Then put the formula "=Search("/", A1)" in cell B1 and copy that to cell B2, B1 evaluates to #VALUE! and B2 evaluates to 3.
Re: Cursed Excel: "1/2"+1=45660
#37Curious to wonder how many academic papers/other kinds of analysis have perhaps come to incorrect conclusions because of these date inconsistencies!
Re: Cursed Excel: "1/2"+1=45660
#38The one that always bites me is Excel truncating the leading zero in US zip codes (they start with 0 in the Northeast US). I’m wondering if that would have happened if Microsoft was located in Boston instead of Seattle.
That because Excel defaults to treating numeric data as a number and leading zeros are extraneous and it will strip them off before storing the value (and it will right justify the display).
The root issue is that zipcodes though numeric in content (at least in the US) should not be treated as number (data type) but instead as a text (string) value
To tell Excel to treat this numeric data as a string you to either
* Precede the value with a single quote (') - Excel will treat the rest of the data as a string (and won't hide the leading zeros)
* Before entering the value set the format to TEXT which will tell Excel to take the entry verbatim with no inferring what the data represents (i.e. a number or date)
Re: Cursed Excel: "1/2"+1=45660
#39It really bugs me when computers try to figure out what you mean. What I mean is what I typed, and if I typed it incorrectly, I would delete it and type it again.
What do you mean when you type in '"1/2" + 1'? Unless you just want to keep that text as plain text, it's going to be doing some interpreting.
The answer is 1/21, clearly. I guess what it should do is give a green squiggly if the implicit conversions are suspicious.
Re: Cursed Excel: "1/2"+1=45660
#40It really bugs me when computers try to figure out what you mean. What I mean is what I typed, and if I typed it incorrectly, I would delete it and type it again.
What do you mean when you type in '"1/2" + 1'? Unless you just want to keep that text as plain text, it's going to be doing some interpreting.
I cannot imagine any programming language interpret "1/2" as a day and month in that specific context.
It takes a very special mindset to do that, maybe the kind that comes from a junior MBA manager, for example ... and even then I find that farfetched.
It sounds more like one of those things that is observed, but some manager decided it is not high priority enough to fix right away. And then technical debt raises its ugly head.