I have never run into this problem and wondered why. I realised it’s because I instinctively put an equal sign whenever doing a fraction.
I have the opposite problem. Half the time no matter how much I change the formatting on the cells I can’t get a table to sort by date. It insists on alphabetical instead, so you’ve got 1/12/2024 ahead of 1/13/2023.
The solution for that is using a sane format for dates.
Yeah - I don’t get to determine what date format 3rd party reports are generated in before I import into excel.
But excel has formatting options specifically designed to address this that it just ignores half the time.
When I worked in radio production, basically everything was formatted like YYYY-MM-DD. Which means stuff is really to find and properly in chronological order.
I still usw the MM-DD format for my own file formatting, even though DD-MM is the Dutch standard.
YYYY-MM-DD is god’s perfect date notation as far as I’m concerned.
This is not a glass.
Parrot says otherwise
Realist: the glass is plastic
The more lines you add in a program, the more stuff can break which is what I assume happens with excel when it thinks something is a date.
Spreaking from experience, my code is in a metaphorical sense a building that is built to lean towards the wind, but when the wind stops, the entire thing collapses. I assume that’s how excel’s code base works too.
Libre Office: the glass is Feb 1st
In JavaScript it would be February 2.
In JavaScript it would be “true” for some reason
I am almost sure 1/2 is indeed true
Edit: in javascript
Also the civilized world.
Some countries use YYYY MM DD which is also sane.
YYYY-MM-DD is the only sane format.
%s is cool as well in my opinion.
I prefer writing it out as DD MM YYYY, but i like my computer to sort everything by YYYY MM DD.
YYYY-MM-DD is the ISO standard for that exact reason. It sorts chronologically without having to implement a custom comparator, regular string comparison is enough.
Physicist: state is undecided
Pretty sure I’ve had excel do something like change 1/2 into March 6th…
Or a UPC into scientific notation…
I’ve been doing heavy Excel/data work for years and never have I ever wanted or needed anything in scientific notation.
The realist: This is piss.
Or would that just be pissimistic?
It was once
That’s 0.5 more than January 0th, 1900.
1st of February.
