I've never understood why they don't let you turn off automatic date parsing. That one feature has caused me more grief than anything else in Excel.
> Unfortunately, news of the 1582 promulgation had not yet reached the developers of Lotus 1-2-3, so they assumed that 1900 (being a multiple of 4) was a leap year.<p>Joel Spolsky mentions a more charitable take on this from Ed Fries:<p>> Lotus had to fit in 640K. That’s not a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That’s really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn’t matter to be wrong for those two months way in the past.<p><a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...</a>
The one that always bites me is Excel truncating the leading zero in US zip codes (they start with 0 in the Northeast US). I’m wondering if that would have happened if Microsoft was located in Boston instead of Seattle.
It really bugs me when computers try to figure out what you mean. What I mean is what I typed, and if I typed it incorrectly, I would delete it and type it again.
I would be careful on dates not just before 1582 but before 1753.<p>Great Britain and its colonies (which included USA) did not change to Gregorian until 1752 and also to confuse more changed the date on when the year changed from March to 1st January.<p>If you are in Greece or Russia be even more aware as that will be around 1920 when they changed.
I feel like this needs to be shared in this discussion: <a href="https://imgur.com/VOjiRgx" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/VOjiRgx</a>
Why would you type text if you need math to happen? Who cares if "1/2 + 1" are getting parsed wrong when you're typing them as text: you use Excel, so you know that math starts with "=". These are "user refused to even learn the basics" examples, not "cursed". The only cursing is anyone who's ever used spreadsheet software going "yes, that's how that works, why are you pretending that your own mistakes are the software's fault?"<p><Reads the last paragraph><p>Ooohhhhh it's an ad disguised as an article to bait people who don't use spreadsheet software into using <i>their</i>, "more intelligent" spreadsheet software. Okay.
Caution: this seems to be an ad for "quadratic", which promises "The spreadsheet with AI". I'm sure it will turn out much better than Excel, a spreadsheet without "AI".
I'm not sure why this is FP news. I knew "1/2" was being interpreted as "January 2" as soon as I saw the title. This is nothing new, or even particularly interesting -- Excel (and Sheets) have been doing this date conversion from the beginning.<p>This is just an ad for Quadratic, nothing more.
Curious to wonder how many academic papers/other kinds of analysis have perhaps come to incorrect conclusions because of these date inconsistencies!
time for an update to "wat", which is a talk in this vein for JavaScript<p><a href="https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat" rel="nofollow">https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat</a>