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"...
According to a reader comment in this article <https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/06/excel_gene_names/>, Excel lets you change the format, but it seems a lot of scientists, experts in their field (which presumably includes expertise in the tools they use for their job), can’t seem to figure this out.
Also I tried creating a text file with the following lines, using the examples mentioned in the article:
DEC1 SEPT2 MARCH1
and see what LibreOffice Calc would do with that. Before loading the file, it presented me with a dialog to specify the import format--tab or comma delimited, character set etc. And also to let me choose the type for each column. The default “Standard” type kept the cell contents as text. Actually, even explicitly choosing a “Date” type didn’t work: they still displayed as the original text!
Good to know! :-) I always thought that the explicit import dialog for CSV files in LibreOffice was far superior to Excel's "let's just try loading the CSV file and then the user can fix things that I screwed up"... 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/