Post #1271619
2026-04-16 13:22 UTC
Replies (13)
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@michcampbell@fediscience.org 2026-04-16 13:26
I know this was Excel because a fresh download and opening directly in R had all the dates correctly formatted.
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@sunflowerinrain@mastodon.online 2026-04-16 14:48
@michcampbell@fediscience.org I gleefully stopped using the dreaded Excel in 2002, apart from a few weeks of a holiday job where OpenOffice and Lotus weren't available. All Libre now. The spreadsheet has occasional wobbles with formatting. I think the problem is spreadsheets!
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@d2718@hachyderm.io 2026-04-16 14:49
@michcampbell@fediscience.org @defuneste@fosstodon.org This is probably a legacy of the original Lotus (or maybe even VisiCalc) spreadsheet storing dates internally as the number of days since Dec 30, 1899, and every major spreadsheet since falling all over itself to be bug-for-bug compatible. It's decades of legacy stupidity.
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@stevegis_ssg@mas.to 2026-04-16 16:05
@michcampbell@fediscience.org You'd only think that if you hadn't used it!
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@futuresprog@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2026-04-16 20:07
I haven’t witnessed that one yet, thankfully, although recently Excel is really sure I want / instead of - in my dates. I’ve seen two different people get different dates from the same CSV file. One person was in the US with middle-endian dates. Where the dates could be parsed that way they got turned into mm-dd-yy and where they couldn’t they got left as into dd-mm-yy Another person got dd-mm-yy the entire way through. A right disaster. Tada! Excel! @michcampbell@fediscience.org
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@brad@social.chinwag.org 2026-04-16 22:43
@michcampbell@fediscience.org Now that’s some spicy fuckery.
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@joncounts@mastodon.nz 2026-04-17 07:35
@michcampbell@fediscience.org Yes, it’s baffling. Excel has been wrecking date data for decades. I collect a lot of data and stay well away from Excel. Spreadsheets in general are dangerously flexible things. They need to be used with validation, which it seems almost no Excel users do.
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@bencourtice@aus.social 2026-04-17 07:46
@michcampbell@fediscience.org no-one should ever trust dates in excel data
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@jromanowska@fosstodon.org 2026-04-17 08:01
@michcampbell@fediscience.org When teaching basics of R to medical students, I've learned that opening a csv file in Excel can make it unreadable for R. Don't ask me how 🤷 Now, I'm explicitly stating in my classes: "Don't open the .csv file" :D
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@Sablebadger@dice.camp 2026-04-17 08:24
@michcampbell@fediscience.org I have a theory. When I worked at Microsoft (ugh) I was QA on Microsoft Project. There we had one guy who knew how the core code worked. He retired. The next versions of the software were built without the knowledge because it went with him. I bet Excel is like that, the core engine knowledge is probably lost. And all releases are essentially wrapping more "features" around that core that no one knows how it works anymore. And are afraid to touch it because if it breaks...
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@paulh@cloudisland.nz 2026-04-17 08:33
@michcampbell@fediscience.org Reminds me of the old joke: The Optimist: The glass is half full The Pessimist: The glass is half empty Excel: The glass is January 2
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@mllsc@beige.party 2026-04-17 17:39
@michcampbell@fediscience.org I work in Excel daily doing tragically manual cash applications among other things. sometimes Excel seems to know just what I want, but it's more of a broken clock type of situation than anything. Dealing with all the different ways a company can say "these are the invoices we paid" gets as annoying as you would imagine, and Excel can make it better or so so much worse!
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@mikebabcock@floss.social 2026-04-18 22:27
@michcampbell@fediscience.org I only ever do copy and paste into Excel, I never "open with" because I simply don't trust it. On my own devices, it simply isn't installed which saves me many headaches.