this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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If you think the insanity stops here - you haven't heard of February 29th, 1900
Even "better": https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates
The renaming is based on a meta study that found that about 20% of all studies involving these genes had errors traced back to excel converting them to dates.
Some code piled up in there over the years.
Very interesting! I never knew about years like 1900 (or other century years that aren't divisible by 400) not being leap years. TIL!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/determine-a-leap-year
Excel preserves this bug deliberately to maintain compatibility with spreadsheets that were produced with Lotus 1-2-3, a program which no one cares about anymore, with the only consequence of fixing it being that all of those companies and corporations with bugged worksheets will have to update their dates just once.
But Microsoft is adamant about Excel preserving all of its legacy jank specifically so it will not break equally janky spreadsheets that some absurd number of businesses rely upon for their daily operations, and without which much of the Western world would apparently collapse into a quivering heap. Or so it is feared, anyway.
The absolute refusal to change anything is how Excel got where it is today. Businesses and workers alike would shit if they rolled into work one day and Excel was behaving differently.
It's not simply a matter of updating sheets now and again, it's a matter of trust. If Excel was constantly (or ever) evolving, how do you trust it's output?
Oh no, it would force businesses to legitimize their currently half-assed spreadsheet-as-application nonsense.
Asking billion-dollar industries to use proper programming languages, or to use decent version control and configuration management, or at least just to fucking document the particular environment a workflow uses (e.g. the version of Excel the spreadsheet is intended to run in) so that it can be reproducible, is obviously completely unreasonable!
Yeah, I'm sure your bakery's software dev. team is just too lazy to develop proper software.
If the bakery is doing something so complicated with Excel that they'd be screwed if Microsoft fixed the bugs in it, then they should have a dev team!
From what I've seen done in spread sheets, I'm convinced a major change in Exel could cause global anarchy.
Phyllis in accounting would have a bird. Someone would probably wind up murdered with a staple puller.
Phyllis is in Sales though. I think you mean Oscar