I hate to sound like a salty old IT guy, but here we go. It is not the fault of Excel that people are using it wrong. They have the ability to import the data as text but they skip that step all together. If the user does not say up front what the column is, Excel has to guess. If Excel didn't try to guess, someone would be making a comment on how bad usability is when an obvious date field was getting interpreted as text.

It's also behavior that goes back to the Ancient Times and predecessors such as Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Even ancient ones will tell you if you need to enter a thing and it has to be text and only text precede it with a quote mark, ie 'MARCH1, just as you would precede a formula with =. It's Spreadsheet 101 knowledge dating back many decades.

The clickbait headline is fun, but the real headline is more like "Scientists find it easier to rename things than learn the basics of data entry in the tools they use".

> It's Spreadsheet 101 knowledge dating back many decades.

Astounding, I've literally never heard of this in the 20 years or so I've been using spreadsheets. I'll be using it from now on!

Welcome to the lucky 10,000 [1] club! It's a fascinating thing about cultural knowledge that stuff that should be taught early in using a tool, people discover anew every day. It's a useful reminder that I also wasn't disparaging the scientists for finding renaming easier than retraining. I'm sure these scientists were very familiar with the costs of learning/relearning. (ETA: Which is why my real joke was about ancient ones and how easily knowledge of the 70s/80s seems ancient and easily forgotten.)

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Excels usability isn't bad though. Which is why everyone uses it. It falls down in this (and lots of other cases) but if you want to see what good usability looks like, look at what people use.

Everyone uses Excel because it's a tool everybody learned at University or even highschool, nothing more, it's not because it's good at all.

It's a terrible app but Microsoft managed to shove it everywhere in education. Same for Words.

Unfortunately Libre Office and co tried to reproduce the terrible UX of both software, while coming up with inferior functionalities because they had to try to maximise compatibility with these MS tools, time not spent on providing actual useful stuff.

Access is a bit better and I wish more non programmers learned basic SQL instead of Excel.

> Everyone uses Excel because it's a tool everybody learned at University or even highschool, nothing more

My anecdote is the exact opposite.

I was recently introduced to using Excel and actually writing some VBA inside of it when I helped a non-programmer with a complicated data processing task on a sheet they were populating from a database.

This was the first time I really used Excel, even though I've had continuous access to it since Windows 3.0.

Aside from some small annoyances, it was a generally pleasant experience. I also can't think of any tool that comes remotely close to the power and flexibility of Excel, particularly for people who are not programmers.

I kind of got hooked on it, and now I frequently use it for little data processing tasks that I used to do in a REPL - and the bonus is I can share those with people who are not programmers.

You may enjoy "Pure Functional Programming in Excel" by Felienne Hermans presented at GOTO 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw

> because they had to try to maximise compatibility with these MS tools,

Worst excuse ever. Excel had to maximize compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3 (in the 80s/early 90s, the dominant spreadsheet application by far) from Day 1. It wasn't just that the files were compatible, Excel included keystroke compatibility so 1-2-3 experts could continue navigating the UI with their old commands.

Unlike the LibreOffice team, Microsoft made a superior program in virtually every way, despite the burden of backwards compatibility with another program.

So what in your opinion is "the right tool" to deal with spreadsheet type of tasks while maintaining things like easy to move to other PC and so on?

It may be a terrible app, but it's better than the competition. Does that mean it's the best one?

My favorite is still that Excel can't handle dates before 1900