this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
549 points (97.9% liked)
memes
10942 readers
3390 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.