MM/DD/YYYY detected. Burn it with fire!
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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Engineering Memes
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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.
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.
The absolute refusal to change anything is how Excel got where it is today. Businesses and workers alike would shit if they rolled into work one day and Excel was behaving differently.
It's not simply a matter of updating sheets now and again, it's a matter of trust. If Excel was constantly (or ever) evolving, how do you trust it's output?
Oh no, it would force businesses to legitimize their currently half-assed spreadsheet-as-application nonsense.
Asking billion-dollar industries to use proper programming languages, or to use decent version control and configuration management, or at least just to fucking document the particular environment a workflow uses (e.g. the version of Excel the spreadsheet is intended to run in) so that it can be reproducible, is obviously completely unreasonable!
Yeah, I'm sure your bakery's software dev. team is just too lazy to develop proper software.
If the bakery is doing something so complicated with Excel that they'd be screwed if Microsoft fixed the bugs in it, then they should have a dev team!