this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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What's wrong with excel?
Excel is great.
It does so much that people make it do what it shouldn't, and never think to explore technologies beyond it... Like a proper fucking database.
Then you get garbage business systems based on fragile excel sheets with bonkers macros and weird ETL pipelines to sync things.
And never try to deal with dates and timezones.
Or anything that looks like dates.
Gene scientists had to revise their whole naming scheme because Excel would see MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring-CH-Finger Type 1), and 'helpfully' convert it into a date, rendering it useless (since it uses timestamps on the backend).
It's bad enough that my data science course recommended against opening CSV files in Excel, because it would edit the file to do the conversion, even before you explicitly saving, mangling your data before you could process it.
Reminds me of my last job where I had to build a ridiculously complex excel spreadsheet that I copied a bunch of reports into to do scheduling because someone decided I didn't need access to the actual data...
It's an awful mix of half-assed approaches to things. Awkward syntax on everything and very poor at recognizing what types of data it is handling.
Open a CSV in a fresh Excel install. It will almost certainly mistake something for a date if the CSV is sufficiently large (unless the user is exceedingly explicit at changing settings for that particular CSV). It will reformat that data as a date, and as an added bonus, since Autosave is on by default, it'll save that reformatted data back into your CSV. Yes, settings can be changed to avoid these things. But why isn't it just designed better so as to avoid it altogether?
If that was just a natural side effect of spreadsheet apps, I could understand it. But LibreOffice Calc is a million times better at recognizing what types of data it is handling, so it seems to just be Excel's shittiness.
The fact that it also hasn't really changed beyond aesthetics since 2004 is just... wild.
Can confirm. I've sent csv files to my coworkers, and they've tried to tell me that the files I sent were invalid. It's because they opened up the file in Excel to look at it first, and Excel autosaved the reformatted data.