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Excel is stuck. It can't change this behavior if it cares about backwards compatibility. There are uncountably many recorded macros and all sorts of scripts a
by T-hawk 6y ago
Excel is stuck. It can't change this behavior if it cares about backwards compatibility. There are uncountably many recorded macros and all sorts of scripts and data tools everywhere, that implicitly and inadvertently depend on behavior like this. Like Javascript's warts, you have to declare these as features and live with them.
Of course Microsoft has thought about this, it's silly to think they never have and we're smarter. Yes, this behavior is annoying and US-centric, they know that. But they also know that breaking compatibility with all these scripts and macros would be the worse problem in the larger picture. That picture is huge, it would be on the order of the scope of the Y2K effort to modify every code everywhere that's ever touched Excel dates.
Would you want Excel to introduce a "quirks mode" to handle this sort of thing?
- loktarogar 6y agoimagine if they worked with the industry to build in a set of relatively agreed upon defaults, like turning autoformat off for dates that matched a critera. then geneticists could activate the geneticist profile and excel works as they'd expect. if they encountered a file that broke, they could turn that profile off. that's a fairly sophisticated solution, but it's just one of many potential approaches to fixing the problem.
- mjevans 6y agoIt would be way less effort to have the same exact program under a completely new name. MS Excel MS (names are harder than I thought / remembered) Matrix In the back-end they'd use the same sanity and share 99% of the code, but Excel would add in the cruft / warts compatibility quirks.
- roenxi 6y agoAnd they could do even better technically and have "MS Excel" be implemented on top of MS Matrix using an extension framework. That'd really firewall the cruft and encourage the core program to be flexible.
- p1necone 6y agoLess effort and they can charge twice for the same product, genius!
- HeavyStorm 6y agoOnly everybody knows what excel is, and no one knows Matrix. And unfortunately my guess is that most Excel users don't surf HN or other geek sites.
- mr_toad 6y ago> It can't change this behavior They could easily make it an optional behaviour.
- Zetaphor 6y agoExactly, add a checkbox in the settings menu and the problem is solved for everyone.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago> "Exactly, add a checkbox in the settings menu and the problem is solved for everyone." A million checkboxes in the settings menu later, people will be griping that "Excel is terrible for having all these crazy settings to deal with!"
- HeavyStorm 6y agoIn other words, a quirks mode.
- qubex 6y agoThey could even have it on by default, or rather, have “Excel NG/Matrix” be an optional no-quirk behaviour regimen. They could have a scripting environment variable that is “quirkkMode=ON” by default and would maintain backwards compatibility at the small expense of needing to specify sane behaviour as an exceptional circumstance: just another line of boilerplate. There’s a lot of things they could do. They’ve no doubt considered all of them and then some, and yet they‘c’è decided to do almost nothing. I suppose that says something about the disconnect between how we and they perceive their incentives, but I’m not sure what that assertion is.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- boublepop 6y agoExcel doesn’t care about backwards compatibility. Random things break every single major update. If only the breaks were because they where fixing these extremely annoying “features” then it would be understandable, but no, they persist.