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Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

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Re: Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#91

Post by shadowgovt »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #50
jasode wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The real problem is of course using Excel to maintain data. That's not what it's for. That's what databases are for. Excel is for complex calculations over rows and columns. I use MS Excel extensively and create new .xlsx files every week even though I know databases like SQLite, MySQL, and did consulting for Oracle RDBMS. The problem is that databases do not include a GUI for data viewing . And even though I also k…

You are not supposed to have a GUI view when you have 100K+ entries. Excel misguides people to think that database management is easy. The reality is it is not possible to have a GUI view of middle-large databases with millions of entries because it is computationally impossible

It's not computationally impossible; it's a hard problem that nobody has solved because they haven't found the niche to monetize it.

A user only has a tiny screen relative to the size of the backing data. The hard part is efficiently fetching the data to populate that screen. But it's not unsolvable; just tricky. Approaches like building realtime indexes speculatively based on likely next user query could help.

Google Sheets actually works a bit like this already, as it's backed by an online datastore.

Re: Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#92

Post by Linosaurus »

mdb31 wrote: post #24
hoseja wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easy action should be safe by default.

Yes, but without inventing a time machine to go back to 1985 or so (at which time the safe option did not exist , so better invent temporal code backporting as well), that's not a viable option. Any change to Excel's 'open a worksheet' logic would break so many workflows it's just not funny anymore. I'm not kidding if I say I suspect it would significantly impact several countries' GDP for a while. Even the (sometime…

> Any change to Excel's 'open a worksheet' logic would break so many workflows it's just not funny anymore.

My preferred work flow would be to open the csv, change some formatting, then reinterpret the original data.

It would require keeping two sets of data for each cell, but that seems to already be the case since F2-enter on each cell would accomplish exactly that. Last I tried.

Re: Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#93

Post by listenallyall »

mcv wrote: post #20

The real problem is of course using Excel to maintain data. That's not what it's for. That's what databases are for. Excel is for complex calculations over rows and columns. And of course it should be better at data validation; you should be able to tell it whether a certain column is a date or not, and Excel shouldn't be jumping to stupid conclusions about it, but it does, and that means you need to be careful and n…

> you should be able to tell it whether a certain column is a date or not

You can, very easily

Re: Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#94

Post by ChadNauseam »

mcv wrote: post #67
jasode wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The real problem is of course using Excel to maintain data. That's not what it's for. That's what databases are for. Excel is for complex calculations over rows and columns. I use MS Excel extensively and create new .xlsx files every week even though I know databases like SQLite, MySQL, and did consulting for Oracle RDBMS. The problem is that databases do not include a GUI for data viewing . And even though I also k…

> The problem is that databases do not include a GUI for data viewing. Exactly. It baffles me that such a tool still doesn't exist (though elsewhere someone claimed that MS Access is like this; I'm not familiar with it). Keeping this in the cloud, with a web-based Excel-like interface, where you can share it with anyone you choose, but keep a single source of truth, I think that would be incredibly useful and solve t…

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't that what Airtable is?

Re: Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#95

Post by cjsawyer »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #90

> Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept. This is why I think that's wrong: if you allow people to be sloppy with how they do things, they'll do it, and then make it part of their workflow, product, religion or whatever, and now everyone is stuck with it. Be absolutely explicit with what you accept and refuse to deal with crap. Then you will only ever have to maintain a simple validator and t…

Then your competitor accepts messy data and you go out of business.

Re: Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#96

Post by adhesive_wombat »

cjsawyer wrote: post #95
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #90

> Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept. This is why I think that's wrong: if you allow people to be sloppy with how they do things, they'll do it, and then make it part of their workflow, product, religion or whatever, and now everyone is stuck with it. Be absolutely explicit with what you accept and refuse to deal with crap. Then you will only ever have to maintain a simple validator and t…

Then your competitor accepts messy data and you go out of business.

Then file a bunch of bugs on their product relating to messy data in various pathological states and tie up their engineering for months. Game on!

Re: Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#97

Post by burntoutfire »

Reality adapting to software (instead of the other way around) seems to be more and more common. Just today, my local library sent out email informing users that, while they agree that they shouldn't charge late fees for non-work days, the software company they use doesn't want to introduce such feature into the software, so they have no way but to charge for those days.

Re: Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#98

Post by hoosieree »

jmchuster wrote: post #7

Similarly, if your last name is "Null", sometimes it's just easier to just change your last name.

Don't change it to "None", though. That's just a curse for your grandchildren to deal with when Python eventually becomes the new old legacy system.

"Nil" is probably safe, because the lisp curse will actually work in your favor.

Re: Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#100

Post by jaclaz »

ableal wrote: post #76
mcv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that databases do not include a GUI for data viewing. Exactly. It baffles me that such a tool still doesn't exist (though elsewhere someone claimed that MS Access is like this; I'm not familiar with it). Keeping this in the cloud, with a web-based Excel-like interface, where you can share it with anyone you choose, but keep a single source of truth, I think that would be incredibly useful and solve t…

Funnily enough, I think one the original IBM PC killer apps was exactly that - dBase III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBase MS Access was the usurper of dBase's crown. And then Excel took over ...

I would mention also (although it didn't have much success in the end) the Borland database, Paradox for Windows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_(database)

I am not at all a programmer, but I remember that at least in early version(s) MS Access (circa 1994, Windows 3.1 times) was well behind Paradox in usability.

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