3 ms·
Mostly the problem comes from how excel is apocalyptically shitty at inferring datatypes, incorrectly assuming non-dates are dates and ISO8601 dates are god kno
by Pxtl 5y ago
Mostly the problem comes from how excel is apocalyptically shitty at inferring datatypes, incorrectly assuming non-dates are dates and ISO8601 dates are god knows what, when a sane format would default to text if it didn't know better.
- anigbrowl 5y agoThat kind of frustration was what drove me away from spreadsheets in the end. Someone sent me a native excel file for the first time in ages the other day and I just opened it in Pandas without thinking about it. Pandas also gets things wrong (eg give it a column of unix timestamps with one missing value and there's a good chance it will treat them as float) and it took me a while to adapt to its vector math approach. But once I got comfortable with it working with a new pile of messy data began to feel pleasant rather than annoying.