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Admin
Er, Saab Sep-03-07's and Saab Sep-05-07's, rather.
Admin
Jesus Christ on a motorbike. I hope that you are joking!
Admin
I know someone who uses Excel to write letters. Worst case of "man who owns only a hammer..." I ever saw.
Admin
Addendum (2008-04-04 19:54): Ugh, something ate my entire message.
The thing is Excel IS a database. Its not a high falutent one like Oracle or SQL. But it is still a database.
Of course it should not be used for enterprise things (like keeping track of 400,000 propertiers)
Admin
Read the OOXML specification sometime. The stupidity goes far deeper than you care to know, given that application bugs are specified in the format itself.
If that isn't a WTF, I don't know what is.
Admin
When an Office app "auto corrects" something for you. You can immediately hit Ctrl-Z. It will undo the correction, and eventually remember you don't want that correction!
Thats because more people have told Microsoft that their software is too complicated than have told Microsoft their software is easy to use.Admin
I got hit by this the other day because of a typo that looked like a date. The really annoying thing is that it then automatically sets the cell type to date, so whatever you type after that, it tries to convert to a date. You have to go change the format back to general to get it to stop messing up your numbers.
Admin
Admin
What's even worse is that zip codes are not numeric, they are alphanumeric. Zip codes can end in XX and HH for large areas around national parks and preserves (XX) and around large bodies of water (HH). While they are largely uninhabited, people DO live in them.
Admin
Wow! Thanks!
Admin
Oh man they write articles in SCIENCE JOURNALS about this http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80 :-|
Admin
Admin
I have a number of files with fields like '-ln12'. These are game data files and the code means 'minus [insert linear returns formula using param fields 1 and 2]'.
Naturally, Excel thinks they are cell references and replaces them all with error codes. Bye bye, file.
......
At work, I hate it when I combine data from multiple sources and I end up with a row of numbers which just don't want to be sorted properly. And whenever I use them in a formula, I get an error code.
This is because some of the numbers are stored in a different format, and annoyingly, changing the format in the options DOES NOT HELP. They'll just stay the way they are.
The official solution (as documented in the help) is:
That's Microsoft professionalism for you.
......
Which reminds me: stop wiping the clipboard when I type something! Jesus!
......
On the bright side, the Ribbon really IS easier to use than pecking through 50 buttons to find the nondescript one you need.
Too bad they don't have it at work, though. And because Excel functions are also translated and I have the English one at work and the Dutch one at home, I pretty much have to learn both the operation of the software AND the functions twice.
Admin
Tried it in Open Office and it gave me 01/01/1948
At least it's a valid year.
Admin
I think the problem is more fundamental.
Excel is a spreadsheet, not a database and not a word processor. While you can use Excel as a database, it doesn't always work well.
Solution:
Admin
At a guess, they're auto-populating Excel via COM, and just didn't foresee an address line ever containing a value that Excel would assume to be anything other than text. Their failure to fix it even after it was pointed out may or may not be a WTF, depending on whether the responsible program was developed in-house or purchased (but even in the latter case, as a presumably clueful software house, they should have responded "we'll lean on the authors of that software to fix that, meanwhile here's a workaround").
Admin
While I would love to laugh, I ... too have to admit I have trouble with Excel cell formatting.
Dazzer
Admin
Excellent examples of DWIM. Leveraging GIGO for synergetic win-win!
Or you could relate allegories about Icarus, where the user or equally well the developer or manager decides that
being helpful'' is just the thing to make the application just that moreuser friendly'' or ``intuitive'' or what-have-you, and falls down in seas of agony and mangled data.Me, I like textfiles, unix' text manipulation tools, and ISO8601-style times and dates. If that makes me a heretic, that paints you the religious nut. :-p
Admin
It is not a bug it is a feature. It is up to you the user to half the presence of mind to format the cell accordingly when you know what content type is going to go into the field
Admin
Here's a stupid idea. How about people learn how to USE the software before complaining it's broken? You load up a program that has centuries of man-years of work and expect to be able to use it exactly as you wish without reading any kind of instructions. If you used the time you spend complaining about applications learning how to use them, you'd probably be more productive. And sound less like jerks.
Admin
Open Office.
When you import a spreadsheet, it uses a 'not a date' type for the 123 compatible dates. The 'not a date' type looks like a date, acts like a data, but is not a date: if you try to use it as a date you get the 'off by one' error because Open Office dates are not 123 compatible.
There may be an argument for changing spreadsheet dates to be history compatible or astronomical compatible: after all, spreadsheets aren't databases, they are astronomy and history tools.
And there may be an argument for making spreadsheet dates not 123 compatible: after all nobody views or imports XLS spreadsheets.
But if the best implimentation is a half-baked idea like the Open Office WTF, I'll go back to large ledger sheets.
Admin
here are a few examples (http://www.eusprig.org/stories.htm) of the horrors wrought by Excel (or rather, by Excel users).
Admin
Admin
How is that a RWTF?? While we are building a web app to display a variety of reports based on large numbers of cases of data, we are putting extracts in Excel and using pivot tables to get by in the meantime. And to be compatible with older versions, we have to divide it up by divisions currently.
Admin
Weird thing is, Excel 2003 doesn't make the same mistake as 2007.
Microsoft: Because the day is far too easy.
Admin
Of course, the Real WTF is companies trying to parse apart addresses rather than just storing them as a bunch of simple text fields. Only delivery firms really need to do that; everyone else is best just making sure that they get the addresses passed on correctly. As a bonus, you get to handle international addresses correctly for no extra effort!
Admin
You could just go the proofing tools preferences and disable the 'select entire word' in the editing sub-sub-sub section. That's one of the first things I do when I come across a new install of MS products.
Admin
"...Three weeks ago I ordered another product. Again, the same problem with the address. Again, I sent a letter to them..."
And just what is that... "LE-T-TER" that you speak of?
Admin
Type a single quote before and it will be literal text, i.e. '1/48
Admin
And I thought I was the only one having these problems. reading your comments has been a huge morale booster. Thanks people!
Admin
touche
Admin
garrghhhh! You are going to voluntarily and without dire need introduce an inline apostrophe into your address?
Your code may handle apostrophes without error, but that's still a small ask for generic address handling databases out there... when you crash the website and the thought police come to take you away, don't say you weren't warned.
Admin
[quote user="Frost"][quote user="SomeCoder"] Annoying as it is, there is a standard way to deal with that. Click where you want the selection to start, and hold down the button. Sweep left, past the beginning of the word, then back right to select the rest of the text.
...
You can get both "intelligent" and non-intelligent selection in the same operation that way.[/quote]
So you say that having to reverse mouse direction two extra times is progress? Pray show that in the documentation, too (you imply it's the now-to-be standard behavior).
The only reason Excel/Word behaves the way it does is because some script kiddie a long time ago had come up with this "feature", shown it to the bosses, and they liked it. From there onwards it went downhill.
In most cases, any feature that came up "because it can be done" and then the bosses "like it a lot" will be either unused (and hated by) most of the normal users, or undocumented, or counter-intuitive, or <insert your favorite MMI WTF>.
Admin
Access? Get a real database. Any real database.
Excel is not the tool you're looking for. SQL queries (for example) may be, and some sort of a process to keep them auditable. Say a year from now some observant elementary school kid looks at your reports in the library and says "gee whiz, this makes no sense". You should be able to re-run the query against the historical data and see where the problem was. Good luck with looking at millions of Excel rows. You won't see the error...
The fact that you see the rows gives you a false sense of being in control. SQL queries, or in general queries where you don't see the source data, but only query results, would be safer for your application. Due to psychological reasons, they force you more to think about what may be wrong and how to re-phrase the query to validate your assumptions. It's like instrument flying, vs. Excel being visual flight rules.
So, how do you validate that your Excel-based reporting is producing valid results? What sort of a change-monitoring tool do you use on your Excel files? How can you reproduce the whole process of getting data from the database into Excel? How do you know that some rows weren't lost after you've saved the file for the 56th time? Did you run your Excel reporting tool on some test cases? On invalid data (it should raise some "asserts")? And so on...
I ask all those questions because I've seen first hand where financial data was being ROUTINELY mishandled because noone asked such questions. Unless your don't give shit about the data you're dealing with...
And you sir are an auditor doing all that?! Get someone knowledgeable to work with you. Do not set it out as a newfangled IT project. Just someone to work with you, who knows the risks of handling such data, and how to prevent the most common pitfalls that you rightfully have zero clue about. Just listen to people who know.
I'm dismayed ... but then, what more to expect from government people workers. I'm amazed that you knew about this site at all!
Admin
You should be spanked for thinking that something as sloppily implemented as Excel deserves to be called "a database".
Excel's storage format (with OLE structured storage on top) is failure-prone. Excel's treatment of data (and on-line "helpfulness") is beyond reproach. Excel's culture of porn^H^H^H^Hinstant gratification (you see your data all the time) has been shown, in AFIAK multiple man-machine-interaction (and related) studies, to be error prone: the fact that you see the data keeps you short of fully trying to understand where things potentially fail.
Get a grip...
Admin
Wrong - when a cell is formatted as "Text" then any value entered into it is stored as a string.
Admin
It makes sense when you use a sensible date format (D/M/Y): 1/2 converts to "1-Feb" but 1/13 converts to "Jan-13" so it is perfectly logical.
(Of course the most sensible date format is the big-endian YYYY-MM-DD so that sorting actually makes sense... But I digress)
I was handed a CSV the other day which contained M/D/Y dates (That's a WTF) and Excel had problems reading it: It read the dates where D<=12 as if it were D/M/Y and just presented the other ones as text. But it didn't matter as the CSV was destined as a initial import into a CMS so it was just a matter of using PHP functions to convert it into MySQL-friendly formatting.
Addendum (2008-04-07 08:44):
It makes sense when you use a sensible date format (D/M/Y): 1/2 converts to "1-Feb" but 1/13 converts to "Jan-13" (AKA Jan 2013) so it is perfectly logical.
(Of course the most sensible date format is the big-endian YYYY-MM-DD so that sorting actually makes sense... But I digress)
I was handed a CSV the other day which contained M/D/Y dates (That's a WTF) and Excel had problems reading it: It read the dates where D<=12 as if it were D/M/Y and just presented the other ones as text. But it didn't matter as the CSV was destined as a initial import into a CMS so it was just a matter of using PHP functions to convert it into MySQL-friendly formatting.
Addendum (2008-04-07 08:45): Ah crap. I should be in bed
Admin
The biggest WTF I've encountered with Excel from a user standpoint is the way that it handles numbers as text or text as numbers. Frequently, it will just "decide" that text is a number or that a number is text, and then it doesn't matter how you format it -- vertical lookups will always fail with that field as the key. I've had to instruct the users to insert an apostrophe at the beginning of the number in order to force behavior that will work with a look up.
Admin
I'm afraid that you are wrong, Andrew. You can tell that it isn't properly stored when you try to do vertical lookups against it.
Admin
This is a serious question. What is the alternative to a separate standalone database server and a client application program with proprietary code that needs to be maintained?
Another requirement is to also gives complete control about how the output is formatted and printed, not just a dumb "print table" command that doesn't allow the 3rd item in row 23 to be highlighted cornflower-blue and italicized. And finally something (hardware and software) that costs a few hundred dollars at the most.
Admin
Admin
There might be a WTFy solution using VBA and a default template file.
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/DateTimeEntry.htm
Admin
Both my mother and sister frequently get super-frustrated with WordPerfect's "productivity" features.
(Although I do enjoy Visual Studio's Intellisense)
Admin
"One or two spaces should be left between components with a preference for two spaces, i.e. Flat 2 (two spaces) 17 Jones St. A “forward slash” ( / ) may only be used to separate an appartment, flat or unit number from a thoroughfare number." [sic]
http://www.auspost.com.au/GAC_File_Metafile/0,,2041%255Faddresspresentation,00.pdf
Admin
Got I hate Excel. I have a PHP script that generates Excel documents - one of the fields is a 15 digit reference number. If you format the cell as a number - it displays scientific notation. If you format the cell as text - it displays scientific notation. If you use '1234 it displays '1234 with the cell formatted as either number or text.
Remember boys & girls - Uncle Bill knows what you want more than you do.
Admin
Isn't Excel some sort of program where you - ah - calculate stuff? 1/48 = 0,020833333
Admin
Oh god I wish it were so. Excel seems to format it how it wants on entry THEN treats it like text forever after.
Admin
As in ';DROP TABLE customers;-- ?
Admin
Amazingly, I think you'll find that doing that has no effect whatsoever on Word's behaviour.
Admin
There are a game company that also do that (I live in São Paulo city in Brazil, here the postal codes start with 0), the funny thing as I said that this prevent users from São Paulo from joining the game, and the people from São Paulo are the ones with the most profit potential (São Paulo is both the biggest and richest city of the country)