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Encoding data in cell formatting is questionable practice.
by auxym 4y ago
Encoding data in cell formatting is questionable practice.
- JadeNB 4y ago> Encoding data in cell formatting is questionable practice. "Let's force the user to employ data-management best practices" is, for better or for worse, very much not the design philosophy of Excel. (More to the point, if you must consume the data that someone else produces, then you'd like very much to be able to deal with their less-than-best practices.)
- function_seven 4y agoAgreed, but I can’t control half the sheets I interact with. Users really like to highlight rows, or use coloring to track their progress, or do some insane multi-color-mixed-with-other-formatting system to indicate complex statuses. I’d like to be able to work with that terrible data.
- dhosek 4y agoWhy? Because the tools don’t provide nice ways to interact with it? I use colors and other formatting as ways of providing metadata to cells that I want to be able to move around in the spreadsheet.