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Nov. 18th, 2020 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettWith gratitude to vass, courtesy of mentioning that during teaching this week I'd had to explain some of Excel's... less helpful... proclivities: Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates.
With gratitude tome_and: perpetualBrownian motion machine.
vass, courtesy of mentioning that during teaching this week I'd had to explain some of Excel's... less helpful... proclivities: Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates.With gratitude to
me_and:
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-18 11:31 pm (UTC)(meanwhile I spent a least an hour last night dealing with the fact that libreoffice thought my mixed alpha-numeric UUIDs were numbers and that I would want to auto-increment whatever part it detected as a number when I drag-filled)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-18 11:44 pm (UTC)evolution of the meme
Date: 2020-11-19 12:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 02:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 03:03 am (UTC)Hah! I have also seen a version shared by some of my wlw friend with the 'incel' arm labelled 'lesbians' instead, heh.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 05:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 12:02 am (UTC)You know what excel doesn't handle well? ISBNs.
Older ISBNs lose their starting zeros and the newer 13 digit ones get turned in to exponentials. If you could harness the daily frustration of librarians forever having to fix this you wouldn't need a brownian motion machine - all our energy problems would be solved!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 02:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 08:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 02:06 am (UTC)It's not just words that trigger it, if there's any way it can reinterpret a set of number and separators as a date, it'll do it. For one big set of tables I was porting into Excel from an RPG I ended up manually putting a space in front of every value, it was the only way to get Excel to leave them alone.
Spreadsheet News Network (A Fake News-Network, not a Fake-News Network)
Date: 2020-11-19 02:41 am (UTC)(eta: he starts covering the gene stuff about 12 minutes in)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 07:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 08:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 02:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 04:10 pm (UTC)CSVs from my banks go into a spreadsheet (specifically LibreOffice but that's not really any better than Excel), but bank accounts are one of the few things where spreadsheets actually make some sense; they have dates in weird formats that I'm glad the spreadsheet can turn into ISO8601, and otherwise very simple text and numbers, and are structured in a way that the 2D nature of a spreadsheet works nicely with.
Otherwise, in my life, structured data tends to end up in a database, or a data structure in a Python script, or something like that. (For any given user and application there might be better choices, those are just the easiest tools for me specifically to reach for.)
I appreciate that not everyone wants to deal with programming languages for managing data, leaving a gap for "simple data processing that doesn't suck".
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-20 04:31 pm (UTC)and it'd be really nice to have software that could guarantee I could do that *without changing the data in any way*
AND YET!
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-19 02:24 pm (UTC)LibreOffice is slightly better sometimes? but i have been looking for "just a thing for writing and reading csv files that doesn't have inexplicable fuckery" off and on for literally 10 years and have not found something I don't hate
rule 1: can open, view, close a csv file without ANYTHING ABOUT THAT FILE CHANGING including please do not add a bunch of trailing commas nobody wants that what the fuck
..................anyway. Excel, what the fuck
me to every modern application, sobbing: STOP TRYING TO HELP ME
Date: 2020-11-20 03:18 am (UTC)I can understand that most people, somehow, must like their word/data processors to process their words/data before being briefed on how/how not to do so, even if to me this seems like every kitchen blender available to the general consumer market having a high speed puree setting that activates automatically as soon as you put any food in the jug, as the default... but given that this has been a Known Problem for a long time, why not produce a special edition called Excel Science, which doesn't change anything you don't explicitly ask it to? Or given that Microsoft is Microsoft, why hasn't LibreOffice (or even fucking Google) done that, and the scientists made that the standard?
Re: me to every modern application, sobbing: STOP TRYING TO HELP ME
Date: 2020-11-20 04:36 pm (UTC)"LibreOffice csv viewer"! has almost no "features" other than "you can look at a thing and maybe make a manual edit or two, and i promise your data will not change in any way"
if I really wanted to learn software engineering and had a lot of spare time I would fucking fork LibreOffice or whatever and just get rid of giant swaths of code until I had what I wanted. (and if wishes were horses, etc)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-21 10:23 pm (UTC)