Fuck you Excel, that’s a date, not $946,684,800
Honestly, the automatic datetime conversion is the worst part if you’re just trying to keep it text. It’s idiotic there isn’t a simple way to turn off that off. That’s not formatting, that’s actually changing the data in those cells which may not be what you want.
In case you’re not aware, the latest version of Excel absolutely DOES have that setting (mentioned elsewhere here in the comments). While it’s wild that it took so long, it’s now a solvable problem and everyone should know about it (and upgrade)!
It should be, and should always have been defaulting to the “dont fuck about with my data” setting.
Because there really aren’t too many scenarios where I want my barcodes abbreviated to scientific notation.
can you imagine a world without excel?
Like how several Genes were renamed because of excel https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates
CSV files having their leading zeros cut off fuck my entire world up.
Dealing with phone numbers and people using excel…
libreoffice reigns supreme
I’m not sure what version got this, but there’s a setting now where you can disable auto-conversion and it’s amazing.
https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-excel-disable-setting-auto-conversion-data-into-dates
Holy crap, that’s amazing - I can’t believe it would take this long! I presume straight up numbers are no longer affected, too, but I’m almost willing to trust it and try it out…
“Programmer humor” “excel”
Programmers who have to deal with data I/O and SQL regularly need to use a spreadsheet to examine, columnize and validate data manually, so that data structures are confirmed to be correct. Nobodys programming in Excel per se, but its still a ubiquitous tool that we use on the regular.
