That date auto parsing in Excel is not only a hassle, it can also be gravely life-threatening.

I came across an issue when supporting a medical practice's IT provider with this issue. 

When opening spreadsheets on a cloud storage platform (Autotask/Dayton), the web app would launch web based Excel which was hardwired to US locale, with mm/dd/yy[yy] date format. Zero ability to reconfigure for AU/NZ locale.

The danger here is that screening dates for critical illnesses can get blown out to several months later, or not happen at all, since an admin might see a date in the past and assume the screening had already happened.

This could lead to someone needlessly dying of an illness, because they missed a screening which could have otherwise flagged them for life saving treatment.

The last I heard, the cloud app engineers were in talks with senior Microsoft engineers looking for a fix, but the timeline would be at least a year out.

David


On 7/08/2020 09:13, Peter Reutemann <fracpete@waikato.ac.nz> wrote:

'There are tens of thousands of genes in the human genome: minuscule
twists of DNA and RNA that combine to express all of the traits and
characteristics that make each of us unique. Each gene is given a name
and alphanumeric code, known as a symbol, which scientists use to
coordinate research. But over the past year or so, some 27 human genes
have been renamed, all because Microsoft Excel kept misreading their
symbols as dates. From a report:

The problem isn't as unexpected as it first sounds. Excel is a
behemoth in the spreadsheet world and is regularly used by scientists
to track their work and even conduct clinical trials. But its default
settings were designed with more mundane applications in mind, so when
a user inputs a gene's alphanumeric symbol into a spreadsheet, like
MARCH1 -- short for "Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1" --
Excel converts that into a date: 1-Mar. This is extremely frustrating,
even dangerous, corrupting data that scientists have to sort through
by hand to restore. It's also surprisingly widespread and affects even
peer-reviewed scientific work. One study from 2016 examined genetic
data shared alongside 3,597 published papers and found that roughly
one-fifth had been affected by Excel errors.'

-- source: https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/08/06/147226

This auto-interpreting and getting things wrong has always annoyed me
about Excel and other spreadsheet applications. Not sure whether there
ever was an option to turn off this "auto-detect of content type"...

Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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