News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel. Parent comment

Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by thirdsun on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @08:34AM (#24697024)
Does it? I think it should treat everything as a string since it can't be certain about the correct type. It could also suggest the correct type rather than applying it without user confirmation.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by thedudeabides5 on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @10:25AM (#24697950)
You want Excel to auto-interpret a table of numbers, that come from a CSV, as entirely text?

Looking forward to the first time anyone tries to use your excel on a table of numbers and then immediately has to multiply everything by *1 (in a separate table) just to get it back into numbers...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by throwaway_pdp09 on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @11:10AM (#24698472)
Oh yes please.

At least you would know what's happening and be in control of it

"Hey, is that a date? I bet that's a date!" - Aaaargh Noooo!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by SCNP on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @12:35PM (#24699654)
YES!! I seem to remember a few versions of Excel ago there was a way to import data and set the data type for each column in a preview window to see what it would look like. And to your point, it's very easy to select an existing column in Excel and change the data type anyway. So why not just make everything a string by default?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-... by kausban on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @07:45PM (#24703792)
Maybe you recall the CSV import window in libreoffice
[ Parent | on HN ]