Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

Re:Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreadi... by mdb31 on Monday April 11, 2022 @07:50AM (#30987416)

Yes, but without inventing a time machine to go back to 1985 or so (at which time the safe option did not exist, so better invent temporal code backporting as well), that's not a viable option.

Any change to Excel's 'open a worksheet' logic would break so many workflows it's just not funny anymore. I'm not kidding if I say I suspect it would significantly impact several countries' GDP for a while.

Even the (sometimes comically inadequate) heuristics that Excel uses to auto-determine field types can't be updated, for very similar reasons. Backwards-compatibility is... interesting...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreadi... by Linosaurus on Monday April 11, 2022 @11:40AM (#30990306)

> Any change to Excel's 'open a worksheet' logic would break so many workflows it's just not funny anymore.

My preferred work flow would be to open the csv, change some formatting, then reinterpret the original data.

It would require keeping two sets of data for each cell, but that seems to already be the case since F2-enter on each cell would accomplish exactly that. Last I tried.

[ Parent | on HN ]