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A comment on An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors. Parent comment

Re:An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors by MichaelGG on Saturday August 27, 2016 @11:07AM (#12372642)
I've found it hard to get Excel to turn off the coercions. In telecom tons of inter-company data is exchanged in Excel or CSV files. And very often numbers show up in scientific notation. Or timestamps (10.2 minutes) get coerced into dates. It's infuriating. Sometimes the manual formatting to no format works and sometimes it doesn't. I feel dumb admitting that I can't seem to figure something so basic out.

Excel should really offer an easy way around this.

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Re:An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors by brodie78382 on Sunday August 28, 2016 @12:36AM (#12375323)
My experience is the same, also in telecom/networking. One of our vendors' serial numbers, when entered into Excel, get converted to something else entirely (not sure what exactly), and setting the fields to "text" or "numbers" doesn't seem to do much, consistently.
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