this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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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.
Wait, so if I were to import a csv with data that would normally be interpreted as a date by excel, but preceded that data with an apostrophe, it would still recognize that as a date? I've never tested this, so I'm not sure.
Relatedly, I know someone who was working some ssn data. Unfortunately, if an SSN started with a 0, it would drop that 0. It was a mess for them. I think there was a recent release that allowed you to not ignore leading 0's.
I've never personally tried adding the ' before you import but the one document that was causing problems with that for me recently was an auto generated document so I couldn't have possibly added any spaces or characters before excel went and messed them up anyways.