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I hate to sound like a salty old IT guy, but here we go. It is not the fault of Excel that people are using it wrong. They have the ability to import the data a
by mmcgaha 6y ago
I hate to sound like a salty old IT guy, but here we go. It is not the fault of Excel that people are using it wrong. They have the ability to import the data as text but they skip that step all together. If the user does not say up front what the column is, Excel has to guess. If Excel didn't try to guess, someone would be making a comment on how bad usability is when an obvious date field was getting interpreted as text.
- WorldMaker 6y agoIt's also behavior that goes back to the Ancient Times and predecessors such as Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Even ancient ones will tell you if you need to enter a thing and it has to be text and only text precede it with a quote mark, ie 'MARCH1, just as you would precede a formula with =. It's Spreadsheet 101 knowledge dating back many decades. The clickbait headline is fun, but the real headline is more like "Scientists find it easier to rename things than learn the basics of data entry in the tools they use".
- jackvalentine 6y ago> It's Spreadsheet 101 knowledge dating back many decades. Astounding, I've literally never heard of this in the 20 years or so I've been using spreadsheets. I'll be using it from now on!
- WorldMaker 6y agoWelcome to the lucky 10,000 [1] club! It's a fascinating thing about cultural knowledge that stuff that should be taught early in using a tool, people discover anew every day. It's a useful reminder that I also wasn't disparaging the scientists for finding renaming easier than retraining. I'm sure these scientists were very familiar with the costs of learning/relearning. (ETA: Which is why my real joke was about ancient ones and how easily knowledge of the 70s/80s seems ancient and easily forgotten.) [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/