The problem is they destroy the original data.

If they want rawdata="01/02" to display as "Jan-02" (or whatever), that's annoying but I can fix it. But they also delete the raw data and replace it with "43862". Reformatting cannot fix that and it is Excel that has chosen to actively break it.

They're not even self consistent with this: If I carefully make sure the data is correct (use "'01/02"), then save as csv and load the same file, it breaks. What sort of program can't save\load without losing data!?

That's without touching why they need to interfere or whether the US standard is the correct one to use or that fact excel is no where near this aggressive with any other data format.

(edited to correct feb to jan)

"01/02" does not translate to Jan 2nd in most of the world, because DMY is much more popular than MDY.

Excel is biased for US users.

> "01/02" does not translate to Jan 2nd in most of the world, because DMY is much more popular than MDY.

This doesn't follow. There's no year in 01/02. MD is more popular than DM.

In which country do people use DMY, but also MD? This just sounds wrong, and my (admittedly limited) sampling shows that when DMY is abbreviated it becomes DM. 01/02 is still the 1st of February everywhere I went except in the US.

Who said someone used DMY combined with MD? DMY/MDY is not an exhaustive list of date formats, you know. It is not even an exhaustive list of "incredibly common date formats".

You said “MD is more popular than DM”. In most countries I’ve been to DM and DMY are used more or less interchangeably (with different separators). However, I have never seen anyone use MD, though I assume it happens in the US.

I made no allusion to DMY and MDY being the only possibilities, because that would be ridiculous.

> I made no allusion to DMY and MDY being the only possibilities, because that would be ridiculous.

You did indeed. How else could you interpret this exchange?

>>> "01/02" does not translate to Jan 2nd in most of the world, because DMY is much more popular than MDY.

>> There's no year in 01/02. MD is more popular than DM.

> In which country do people use DMY, but also MD?

The only way to have that question make any sense at all is to assume that MDY and DMY are the only options. That certainly is ridiculous, but I'm not the one who said it.

For fuck’s sake. It’s simple, really: - DMY is much more popular than MDY, in almost all of Europe, Africa, South America, and in large parts of Asia. - DM is a common short form of DMY when the year is not ambiguous => I highly doubt your assertion that MD is more popular than DM, and in fact I am certain that 1 February is a much more common way of parsing 01/02 than 2 January.

Note that none of these points require the absence of any other way of writing dates. You could indeed argue, preferably with examples and not hypotheticals, that some locales exist in which MD would be the natural way, and that they outweigh the others.

Now you can move the goalposts once more if you really need to. It really is tedious.

I think more common than that people mean first of February. Only the US is backwards.