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Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by mr_toad on Thursday August 06, 2020 @07:41PM (#24076574)
> It can't change this behavior

They could easily make it an optional behaviour.

Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by qubex on Friday August 07, 2020 @10:39AM (#24082339)
They could even have it on by default, or rather, have “Excel NG/Matrix” be an optional no-quirk behaviour regimen.

They could have a scripting environment variable that is “quirkkMode=ON” by default and would maintain backwards compatibility at the small expense of needing to specify sane behaviour as an exceptional circumstance: just another line of boilerplate.

There’s a lot of things they could do. They’ve no doubt considered all of them and then some, and yet they‘c’è decided to do almost nothing. I suppose that says something about the disconnect between how we and they perceive their incentives, but I’m not sure what that assertion is.

Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by Zetaphor on Thursday August 06, 2020 @10:21PM (#24077382)
Exactly, add a checkbox in the settings menu and the problem is solved for everyone.
Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by ThrowawayR2 on Friday August 07, 2020 @02:00PM (#24084754)
> "Exactly, add a checkbox in the settings menu and the problem is solved for everyone."

A million checkboxes in the settings menu later, people will be griping that "Excel is terrible for having all these crazy settings to deal with!"

Re:Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misre... by HeavyStorm on Friday August 07, 2020 @06:08AM (#24080296)
In other words, a quirks mode.