My my, why so angry? You're expecting something that Excel doesn't support for good reason. The string you used as an example might be a date string to YOU, but to Excel and many of its users it's just a large integer. Lots of regular use cases would break if Excel would interpret that string as a datwle
If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601
It’s one of the most infuriating and dangerous behaviors I have ever encountered. Excel silently truncates data. The anger is warranted. The problem isn’t assuming a display format for data, it is that a poor assumption actually mangles data. Excel doesn’t fail safe.
Numbers in Excel only maintain 15 digits of precision. Leading zeros are also truncated. If you haven’t experienced this you are lucky (or just didn’t notice) but it is real.
> If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601
You don’t always control the upstream system. Your response can be considered rude because it implies you think you know more than the person expressing pain. This is especially insulting with such a widely known problem in Excel.
This behavior burned me with billing system IDs. Logically they are strings, we would never do math on them. For performance they were implemented as BIGINTs in the DB. Excel truncates everything after the 15th digit. Our IDs were all over 20. So accounting couldn’t reconcile our reports with the billing system.
> It’s one of the most infuriating and dangerous behaviors I have ever encountered. Excel silently truncates data.
That's a problem, sure, but not the one sixothree is complaining about.
> The problem isn’t assuming a display format for data
Your problem might not be, but that’s exactly the problem sixothree is complaining about that the post you are responding to addresses, so while your post references a valid complaint, it is a complete non-sequitur as a response.
If you want Excel to interpret strings as dates, use a more common date representation such as iso8601