3 ms·

Excel spreadsheets are hard to get right

13 points by jmount 12y ago

NamTaf 12y ago
I don't see the problem. A true / false convention of 1 / 0 is not uncommon (nor is its inverse, but pick one) and so excel stores it as thus. Whether it displays as 'TRUE' / 'FALSE' or 1 / 0 is then determined by formatting, which is sensible. The same would apply with dates. Datetimes are zero-indexed floating point numbers incrementing from 0/1/1900 [1]. Whether it's displayed as a date or number is simply a case of what format you select for the cell. Formatting is then obviously specified as a flag in the metadata because by its nature, formatting is metadata not a value. If you implied formatting by the value stored, you open up all kinds of corner case issues (is "19/5/14", for example, an equation, date or string?). I think the .xlsx format is really sensible here, and it's the applications that have woeful compatibility. [1] Yes, 0th January is a date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_0
nn3 12y ago
Welcome to 2014! Where simple bugs are not reported anymore, but instead being written up in sensational blog posts.
- jmount 12y ago
  Well from the Libre Office site: "The BSA is currently broken. Please use https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffice&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffi... instead. We are sorry for the inconvenience." And then "Bugzilla needs a legitimate login and password to continue." I already have way too many accounts to manage to create yet another one to submit the bug report. But I took your advice and submitted the bug https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86456 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86456 edit: and a whopping 1 minute in somebody has linked an empty bug report as a duplicate to this one. nice.
baking 12y ago
Apparently words are hard to get right too. The last sentence of the first paragraph makes no sense in many different ways and the link is bad too. EDIT: Actually the HTML is mangled and a huge chunk of text is not visible.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jmount 12y ago
  Yah, sorry about that. It looked okay in my authoring tool, but it was wrong (fixed now).

13 points by jmount 12y ago

I don't see the problem. A true / false convention of 1 / 0 is not uncommon (nor is its inverse, but pick one) and so excel stores it as thus. Whether it displays as 'TRUE' / 'FALSE' or 1 / 0 is then determined by formatting, which is sensible. The same would apply with dates. Datetimes are zero-indexed floating point numbers incrementing from 0/1/1900 [1]. Whether it's displayed as a date or number is simply a case of what format you select for the cell. Formatting is then obviously specified as a flag in the metadata because by its nature, formatting is metadata not a value. If you implied formatting by the value stored, you open up all kinds of corner case issues (is "19/5/14", for example, an equation, date or string?). I think the .xlsx format is really sensible here, and it's the applications that have woeful compatibility. [1] Yes, 0th January is a date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_0

nn3 12y ago

Welcome to 2014! Where simple bugs are not reported anymore, but instead being written up in sensational blog posts.

jmount 12y ago
Well from the Libre Office site: "The BSA is currently broken. Please use https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffice&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffi... instead. We are sorry for the inconvenience." And then "Bugzilla needs a legitimate login and password to continue." I already have way too many accounts to manage to create yet another one to submit the bug report. But I took your advice and submitted the bug https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86456 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86456 edit: and a whopping 1 minute in somebody has linked an empty bug report as a duplicate to this one. nice.

baking 12y ago

Apparently words are hard to get right too. The last sentence of the first paragraph makes no sense in many different ways and the link is bad too. EDIT: Actually the HTML is mangled and a huge chunk of text is not visible.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jmount 12y ago
Yah, sorry about that. It looked okay in my authoring tool, but it was wrong (fixed now).