This only slightly tongue-in-cheek opinion piece <https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/16/excel_hell_comment/> on the seeming inevitability of data-processing errors due to overuse/misuse/abuse of Microsoft Excel suggests the creation of a whole new industry to mitigate those errors, rather than try to avoid them by switching to another tool.
[...] Looks like Microsoft got afraid that people move away from their tools: 'In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Last week, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that. Excel's automatic conversions are intended to make it easier and faster to input certain types of commonly entered data -- numbers and dates, for instance. But for scientists using quick shorthand to make things legible, it could ruin published, peer-reviewed data, as a 2016 study found. Microsoft detailed the update in a blog post last week, adding a checkbox labeled "Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date." You can probably guess what that toggles. The update builds on the Automatic Data Conversions settings the company added last year, which included the option for Excel to warn you when it's about to get extra helpful and let you load your file without automatic conversion so you can ensure nothing will be screwed up by it.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/10/23/1217252/microsoft-fixes-the-excel-fea... But, open-source tools aren't without blame for "automagic" either. E.g. pandas: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41417214/prevent-pandas-from-reading-na-... At least pandas had a way of turning it off for a bit longer than Excel. :-) I always liked that about OpenOffice/LibreOffice that they had an actual import dialog (eg for CSV files) with a preview. Excel always imported your CSV files as it thought best - with the usual disastrous outcome (oh, look, now I have to go through the extract step of applying the convert text to columns function)... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/