Optional
Wow! You mean we might get some software that treats users as intelligent beings? We don't, really we don't want software that makes assumptions We want options - please.
The days of Microsoft Excel's "helpful" habit of automatically converting values might be at an end as the Windows giant has finally admitted that, yes – not everything is a date. As well as spawning a thousand memes - or so it feels like - Excel's habit of helpfully converting values into types that the user didn't intend has …
It's more like "what do you want to be messed up today?". Honestly, from a UI that takes multiple steps to do anything and you have to be careful with or you get a popup somewhere (with or without unwanted advertising to boot) to a veritable flood of patches that over the PB that have been pumped through the Net throughout the years SHOULD have eventually yielded something stable but hasn't to randomly changing where everything is with every. new. friggin. version I deem it a testament to ignorance and blackmail that they still manage to flog this rubbish.
To me it's proof that 98% of the population are secretly masochistic sheep. Well, OK, some are that publicly.
An aeon ago, I inherited a rather complex application and associated access database. One of the tables had an index field of lowercase letters a to z. Then an Access update introduced spell chucker and similar features to Access. Unbeknown to me it changed all the lowercase letter 'i's to uppercase 'I's, trashing the index. Only came to light after hundreds of CDs had been shipped to clients.
It was published before the ark was built, in fact Noah's rival Yessuh used it to build his ark. sadly it type converted the measurements into talents rather than cubits and Yessuh's ark could only take 2 ants and Yessuh and his family didnt make it...
In theory you should always start formulas with an equals sign. In practice, Excel seems to have some weird, arcane and arbitrary rules around when, how, and if formulas get to be recognised.
I've found it easier not to think about it. Thinking about it makes my brain hurt, as well as making me sad.
I think that's fair enough. IIRC, VisiCalc, probably the first ever mass market spreadsheet on the Apple ][ and similar devices of the time also started formulae with an = symbol.
Edit. I google to help my fading memory, and formulae started with + not =. Maybe it was some other spreadsheet I used in the DOS days, maybe Lotus 1-2-3 or SmartWare.
Far too many people talk about the "productivity" of Microsoft (not the just the stans that show up here) that I have to wonder if we are using the same software.
MS did not get rid of Clippy, it just hid it in every single action you take to get the job at hand, done. I spend more time fighting to turn off the pop-ups and auto-whatevers that productivity goes right out the window.
And even after turning it all off, it gets turned right back on again after any major updates. Or some new annoying "feature" is added whose control is hidden 3-4 layers down.
Yeah and updates? Seems like one every week.
MS has turned just running and maintaining Windows into a full time job. I consider it a good month when I don't have to chase down and kill some annoying "help" feature during that four weeks.
Productivity? For who?
And LOL, how about that Bitlocker boat anchor? Kills 50% performance on your SSD.
There are people born in that 30's that are still alive, and I guess more users have to input birth dates than bond/mortgage maturities...
BTW I'm pretty sure Excel has a setting for the century when the user inputs two-digit years, you may want to look into it. I recall having to tweak it on each reinstall, back when I used to work with securities on version 4 some thirty years ago...
Microsoft 365 Excel: A pack of errors with half of the view full of unuseful command icons, that makes you spend more time solving Microsoft problems than your own work. Everything behaves as if its intuitive source was based on a case of particular illogical and bureaucratic process. Error messages blame lack of user common sense, falsely blames the internet connection, or some technical gibberish that not even Microsoft cares. Google Sheets far better, faster, simpler and honest.
Nothing, repeat NOTHING from Google can be described as 'honest'.
Doesn't everything of theirs steal your data and send it to the mothership to be used against you at a later date in the form of Ads?
Then there is the little issue of sending your spreadsheet data to somewhere that only Google knows where for processing. If your company has rules about data going off-site then you have just broken them. Mind you MS wants you to do the same with Orifice but at least there, they still offer a non-cloudy version that even works offline.
Never been a problem, and I still use 2003 (no ribbons). What you've always needed to do is change your template to be how you want.
For example have in the template a tab called "Auto" (which converts) and a tab called "Text" (which is text only) so whenever you create a new spreadsheet you choose the tab appropriate for pasting/typing into. Or do it ad-hoc with Ctrl-1 Text on the columns/sheet.
Making this as easy to set up as possible is a good thing and I'm sure the new improvements will help that.
LibreCalc has improved over the years and is good at imports but LibreOffice has never been as nimble as Office with even small files sucking the life out of your computer.
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That reminds me of...
https://medium.com/jumpstart-your-dream-life/empty-your-cup-a-zen-proverb-on-opening-yourself-to-new-ideas-10e8c9545c7b
On this particular day, a scholar came to visit the master for advice. “I have come to ask you to teach me about Zen,” the scholar said.
Soon, it became obvious that the scholar was full of his own opinions and knowledge. He interrupted the master repeatedly with his own stories and failed to listen to what the master had to say. The master calmly suggested that they should have tea.
So the master poured his guest a cup. The cup was filled, yet he kept pouring until the cup overflowed onto the table, onto the floor, and finally onto the scholar’s robes. The scholar cried “Stop! The cup is full already. Can’t you see?”
“Exactly,” the Zen master replied with a smile. “You are like this cup — so full of ideas that nothing more will fit in. Come back to me with an empty cup.”
The thing that's most annoying about, particularly, the date conversion in Excel is that it doesn't consider any context: "The other 1000 values in this column are text strings, but *this* one is clearly supposed to be a date!" Or "Only 40% of the cells in this column are valid {EU|US} dates; they are all valid {US|EU} dates. But I'm going to interpret it as {EU|US} dates anyway and the ones that don't work can be text."
The whole idea of spreadsheets is that you have tabular data, i.e. blocks of data where, generally, each column holds the same information for every row. But this concept has never been applied to the parsing logic.
It doesn't look like the update has done anything about this. It's just allowed us to tell it to stop trying - which is something, at least, but a global solution for a very localised problem.