3 ms·

Not to a person who specifically does not want that feature - and since Excel does not provide a way to turn it off or customize it, my idea was that an extensi

by Sacho 10y ago

Not to a person who specifically does not want that feature - and since Excel does not provide a way to turn it off or customize it, my idea was that an extension might be able to. Of course, I've never written an Excel extension(macro?) so I have no idea.

Tomte 10y ago
Of course you can turn it off. By formatting the cells as the correct type.
- Sacho 10y ago
  That's a ridiculous argument and you should know it. Forcing users to do manual work every time instead of having an option to disable or configure a feature is just a UX fail. Doubly so because I would bet those formatted excel files don't survive transition, and the data is actually transmitted in CSV or whatever, so you'd have to reformat the data over and over every time you open to edit it, and hope that someone along the way doesn't make a mistake. This a problem software is meant to solve, not create.. You could argue that all you can do is mitigation since CSV files don't offer much ability to influence how Excel will load them, and all you would need is one improperly-configured Excel along the pipeline to break the data. However, this is a significant mitigation - Excel apps would be configured once, and you would deal with a situation 1% of the time, and the solution would be trivial(just configure it!). Instead now you're dealing with the problem every time, and the solution(just mark the cells!) takes a lot more effort. I don't think Microsoft necessarily has incentive to add this configuration(the science community as a whole is probably a tiny blip on its radar), but this is why we create modular and extensible software - so others can tweak it to their liking.
  - Tomte 10y ago
    No, it's the correct argument. Putting an option in to disable something that only a miniscule number of users would ever want is not sensible. Note bene: I'm only talking about this DEC1-like conversions. I agree that there are lots of conversions that are annoying.

by Sacho 10y ago

Tomte 10y ago

Of course you can turn it off. By formatting the cells as the correct type.

Sacho 10y ago
That's a ridiculous argument and you should know it. Forcing users to do manual work every time instead of having an option to disable or configure a feature is just a UX fail. Doubly so because I would bet those formatted excel files don't survive transition, and the data is actually transmitted in CSV or whatever, so you'd have to reformat the data over and over every time you open to edit it, and hope that someone along the way doesn't make a mistake. This a problem software is meant to solve, not create.. You could argue that all you can do is mitigation since CSV files don't offer much ability to influence how Excel will load them, and all you would need is one improperly-configured Excel along the pipeline to break the data. However, this is a significant mitigation - Excel apps would be configured once, and you would deal with a situation 1% of the time, and the solution would be trivial(just configure it!). Instead now you're dealing with the problem every time, and the solution(just mark the cells!) takes a lot more effort. I don't think Microsoft necessarily has incentive to add this configuration(the science community as a whole is probably a tiny blip on its radar), but this is why we create modular and extensible software - so others can tweak it to their liking.
- Tomte 10y ago
  No, it's the correct argument. Putting an option in to disable something that only a miniscule number of users would ever want is not sensible. Note bene: I'm only talking about this DEC1-like conversions. I agree that there are lots of conversions that are annoying.