The important lesson here is to never use excel sheets for any purpose.
Purpose built software, database gui, SQL or even CSV with data analysis tool will always work better for all purposes.
The fact that you can't stop excel from doing that until you are inside the document means that if you ever import anything into excel it WILL break your numbers into dates and you have to fix them manually. If you are typing a fresh doc you can obviously change the settings but I spent hours working with Microsoft support and they basically gave up saying that they used to have a beta version where you could disable it, but they never added the feature to live excel and they just gave up.
10/10 Microsoft.
you can obviously change the settings
And pray the settings don't change further.
Because they will. I have no idea why or when they do that, but those numbers will always corrupt, there was never an alternative.
Tbf, my Galaxy S22 did this a couple months ago with a system update. All my battery optimization exceptions were reset, so my alarm clock app wasn't allowed to run in the background. Took me a week to figure out why my alarm wasn't going off, because they also changed the location of those settings to an even more obscure menu in app permissions.
Microsoft just does whatever they want and we all have to deal with it. Especially in the corporate space. It's infuriating at times.
If you precede all your data with an ', then excel won't auto convert it total a date. Seems silly to do this for all the data though.
Oh I know. You can do that or just add a single space as well. But you cannot do that before the document is created so if you import something into excel it'll just fuck all your numbers to shit and then you have to spend hours or days unfucking the numbers since even if you tell excel to treat that column as text only it won't put the numbers back correctly.
It's actually impressive how dogshit Microsoft products have become over the years. They clearly knew this was a problem back in 2016 or wherlnever that beta version was floating around where you could just disable the automated date feature entirely beforehand, but I guess they decided they liked pissing off office workers more than giving people meaningful QOL updates over the years.
We should make a parody software called "Microsoft Incel".
it should run chatgpt on every cell with the prompt 'if you had to interpret the value "$VALUE" as a date, what would be the date?', and then replace each cell's value with the answer.
You monster.
I've got a better idea... What if all mathematical calculations were done by chatgpt
Incel Inside.
Poetri
it was better when it was the venn diagram
I remember seeing a venn diagram with three circles. I think the last was something like "me seeing a fig"
https://lemmy.ca/post/2978749 it's made the rounds
This is a venn diagram, you are just prejudiced >:(
/j
This is hilarious.
This is beautiful
