Both of these things are consistent with trying to keep users in Excel. Make it easy to accidentally open Excel, but don’t make it too convenient to use open data formats when you have a proprietary one.
What's the deal with "copy" for example? Why does the source of the copy have to be highlighted, why is it so fragile, why does it disappear from the clipboard when one presses the Escape key? This has been the case since I think the very first version of Excel, and never changed.
I don't know of any other program that works that way. It didn't make sense then (I think), and it doesn't make sense now.
What is the separator in this .csv file ;)
1,2;3,4;5,6
But on a more serious note, I completely agree. There are so many small quality of life things that can and should be fixed in Excel, and it's baffling that they haven't.
Which is the correct budget model?
Budget.xlsx Budgetv2.xlsx Budget.final.xlsx Budget.v2.final.final.xlsx Budget.final.final.submitted.revised.xlsx
It's likely I've mostly had to deal with ASCII / Latin alphabet, so don't know how well it handles unicode.
My company tracks transactions with an ID that is a numeric string that Excel assumes is an integer but longer than it supports so it truncates the value and displays it in scientific notation.
Original value: -7223371999747962216
Truncated value: -7223371999747960000
Displayed value: -7.22337E+18
It would be fine if it just treated it as text but by discarding digits it makes the values useless. You can’t open a CSV file directly. You have to manually import the data and specify specific columns as text. Every. Single. Time. It cannot be automated.
I’ve been sent so many excel files with truncated data like that because most people don’t even know about the problem, let alone know how to work around it.
Unfortunately this means that they're not really fixing most of the annoyances that were already present.
"Excel Labs" appears to just be an add-on using the normal API which is a lot easier than making change to Excel itself.
They've also added stuff like new functions for formulas and a new type of comments that are more like word comments (while renaming the old comments to "note") but it's pretty clear that they have chosen to focus on things that they can tack on without having to change existing functionality (presumably either so they won't break anything and/or because it's simpler easier to add this kind of stuff rather than getting too deep into the existing codebase)
I think you may slightly misunderstand the functionality, it's an updateable link to some other file (which is, frankly, great). I can import a CSV file I generate with code ONCE, build up a huge calculation from it (probably in other sheets), and then the next day, regenerate the CSV, update the link WITHIN EXCEL, and boom, all of my computation is redone.
Very underutilized feature, but incredibly useful when using Excel not as a CSV viewer (if you want that, you can buy that elsewhere) but as a critical part of running a business.
Excel exists to make it almost free to write accounting-like software. It does NOT exist to view CSV files.
- Excel cannot guess the encoding of the file, and relies on the user selecting it from a list that has maybe a hundred values (?!); the most common encoding, UTF-8, is neither at the top or at the bottom of that list, but somewhere near the end, and is called "65001 : Unicode (UTF-8)" (the preceding value is "65000 : Unicode (UTF-7)"). There is little chance non-technical users will get this right the first time, or any time thereafter, and the result is files that are circulated with garbled encoding and wrong values.
- Excel cannot guess the separators either! (How hard can it be?)
That's probably the reason why one cannot "open" a CSV file directly in Excel and having it displayed properly; one has to go through the whole "import" process. Yet Windows insists all CSVs should automatically open in Excel.
Yes, it's a minor thing, but it should be so easy to fix; instead of that, recent versions of Office have brought incredibly annoying animations that take 2-3 screens to disable.