Get Dated

If you think the insanity stops here - you haven't heard of February 29th, 1900

Very interesting! I never knew about years like 1900 (or other century years that aren't divisible by 400) not being leap years. TIL!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/determine-a-leap-year
- Excel preserves this bug deliberately to maintain compatibility with spreadsheets that were produced with Lotus 1-2-3, a program which no one cares about anymore, with the only consequence of fixing it being that all of those companies and corporations with bugged worksheets will have to update their dates just once.
  But Microsoft is adamant about Excel preserving all of its legacy jank specifically so it will not break equally janky spreadsheets that some absurd number of businesses rely upon for their daily operations, and without which much of the Western world would apparently collapse into a quivering heap. Or so it is feared, anyway.
Even "better": https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates
The renaming is based on a meta study that found that about 20% of all studies involving these genes had errors traced back to excel converting them to dates.
Some code piled up in there over the years.

Look, a date!
Always put a ' in front of any information in Excel you do not want changed

If I remember correctly Microsoft once responded saying that it can in fact not turn off that feature in Excel. Excel will always interpret your input and change it to what it thinks is correct

It's always been possible to format a range before inputting data. It won't be interpreted that way.
It only does that when it's formatet as "General" aka "Nobody knows what the fuck I'm about to do".
It would probably be more beneficial to change the default format to something else.
- It would probably be more beneficial to change the default format to something else.
  AfaIk this is not possible. Or MS doesn't allow it. User Defined would be pretty useless if MS would simply stop interpretating what I want to do in general
- It only does that when it's formatet as "General" aka "Nobody knows what the fuck I'm about to do".
  How about handling that as plain text?
  Edit: wait, table calculation, what did i think? Well, i hadn't slebt much or good the last few days and 12 hours now, so there.

MM/DD/YYYY detected. Burn it with fire!

The fix to this problem that the entire world complains about but doesn't bother googling is like, 3 clicks total in 99% of cases.

To be fair, it's a lot of work if 99% of the entire world needs to click 3 times.
I sometimes wonder if Microsoft is deliberately making a shit product just to keep people employed.
- I'd argue excel is one of their better products. Still with a LOT of annoying little quirks, but nonetheless extremely useful.
  The complaint about date formatting is a skill issue, and this particular post I enjoy and makes me chuckle whenever I see it because sometimes it can get it wrong, but it would never get 12.5 wrong unless you manually have formatted it as a date and not General.

This but with goddamn scientific notation.

That and sometimes the answer to fixing it is simply selecting the cell, not changing a thing, and hitting enter.

Yep, I hate that Excel doesn't open CSV files and treat every cell as "Text" considering that's how a CSV stores the data. It loves to convert to scientific notation, or omit leading zeros, or omit trailing zeros on a decimal, or assume something is a date. I always have to update csv files to .txt instead and then import it via the wizard and manually select Text for all columns.