381–390 of 518 posts
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You turn them off,forget about it, and then auto-update turns them all back on for you!
Or you're on a different machine that doesn't have it and you have to decide if digging through the menus to turn them off is worse than manually undoing all of the "fixes" for your message. Have you ever posted a code snippit into a default install of Outlook?
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The usual way to write the date Feb 1st in Germany (and I think anywhere but the US) is 01.02 or 1.2. but not 01/02 And the . is part of the num block as well. Also, data being interpreted different based on region/language settings is a sure way to end up with bugs, so I think its a terrible thing that Excel does this.
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.
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The usual way to write the date Feb 1st in Germany (and I think anywhere but the US) is 01.02 or 1.2. but not 01/02 And the . is part of the num block as well. Also, data being interpreted different based on region/language settings is a sure way to end up with bugs, so I think its a terrible thing that Excel does this.
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.
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...)
Of course Microsoft has thought about this, it's silly to think they never have and we're smarter. Yes, this behavior is annoying and US-centric, they know that. But they also know that breaking compatibility with all these scripts and macros would be the worse problem in the larger picture. That picture is huge, it would be on the order of the scope of the Y2K effort to modify every code everywhere that's ever touched Excel dates.
Would you want Excel to introduce a "quirks mode" to handle this sort of thing?
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The usual way to write the date Feb 1st in Germany (and I think anywhere but the US) is 01.02 or 1.2. but not 01/02 And the . is part of the num block as well. Also, data being interpreted different based on region/language settings is a sure way to end up with bugs, so I think its a terrible thing that Excel does this.
a) You write "1/2" and Excel replaces it with "01. Feb" by default if using de-DE as Locale (just checked it) [This auto replacement is also the basis of the linked article] b) There is no "." on the num-pad for German keyboard layouts, they have a "," the German decimal separator.
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But they don't, and that's a problem. It's an education problem: everybody automatically defaults to Excel, even when it's not the proper tool. People need to learn about better tools.
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…
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 problem with their attitude towards science and data.
It's not that hard to imagine a tool that can do exactly what Excel can, but without corrupting your data. It might even exist already. LibreOffice got mentioned a lot; it can do almost(?) everything Excel can, but without corrupting your data. If there are problems with it that make it useless to scientists, there's a good chance the LibreOffice community can fix them.
I think better tools that preserve the integrity of their data are absolutely the solution here.
A lot of people are attacking excel in this thread, just remember to give a fair share of the blame to people naming genes as well. These are meaningless names and changing them is frankly easier than changing a feature in excel (that the finance folk probably don't want changed). And its a good excuse to clear up some of the egregiously silly disease related names as well so we don't tell parents their kid is suffer…
no these are not meaningless names, there is undue confusication in the case of the more contemporary names such as [Sonichedgehog] these are not meaningless lables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog mentioned eslewhere in this thread is a nomenclature that allows one to easily find notes referring to the gene from your research library. It was a new cadre of young upcoming scientists that decided to break…
You go to someone who's never hears of the hedgehog signaling pathway and ask them what SHH is, they're not gonna be able to give you much.
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...)
But you can select from dozens of formats in the cell setup? Not sure I understand the issue?
Now imagine you load a file with 1000s of values in the form AB/CD, many are trashed. If you save the file, you've lost the original data.
All because it might save some data entry drone 5 seconds to expressly make something a date.
There are then also issues about whether "01/02", assuming it actually is a date, should be the second of Jan (US) or the first of Feb (EU, UK, North America ex US, Africa and Pacific regions). In many places, based on some arbitrary and we'll hidden settings, you will get the wrong result.
I honestly think the only reason excel does this is to force you to use excel formats and make it harder to work with non-MS products...
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>2020-08-06 I've just switched to 20200806. Let it be an int and be done with it.
Human readability sometimes matters.
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LibreOffice AND Google Docs fall in the same exact spot than Excel here. Try it. Type "SEPT-2" or "SEPT2" in any of them and see what happens.
LibreOffice Calc: "SEPT-2" is a date, "SEPT2" is not.