this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) by NegativeLookBehind to c/technology
 

That’s all.

EDIT: Thank you all for detailing your experience with, and hatred for, this miserable product. Your display of solidarity is inspiring. Now, say it with me:

Fuck Microsoft

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Excel is great.
It does so much that people make it do what it shouldn't, and never think to explore technologies beyond it... Like a proper fucking database.
Then you get garbage business systems based on fragile excel sheets with bonkers macros and weird ETL pipelines to sync things.
And never try to deal with dates and timezones.

[–] T156 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

And never try to deal with dates and timezones.

Or anything that looks like dates.

Gene scientists had to revise their whole naming scheme because Excel would see MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring-CH-Finger Type 1), and 'helpfully' convert it into a date, rendering it useless (since it uses timestamps on the backend).

It's bad enough that my data science course recommended against opening CSV files in Excel, because it would edit the file to do the conversion, even before you explicitly saving, mangling your data before you could process it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Reminds me of my last job where I had to build a ridiculously complex excel spreadsheet that I copied a bunch of reports into to do scheduling because someone decided I didn't need access to the actual data...