> I cannot remember the last time I had some long number and thought to myself, "You know what will be helpful, convert this number into scientific notation!"...
Okay, so set formats appropriate to what is useful for your data.
Defaults don't cover all cases, otherwise there would be no non-default options.
> It's asinine Excel has this behavior with any large number. Try to work with a list of EAN/UPC codes...
Codes aren’t numbers they are strings, even if the code is a sequence of digits. They should be formatted as text. For actual numbers that shouldn't be displayed in scientific missions, the appropriate numeric format does that.
> it'll wreck every single one every single time
If its any code that can be safely stored as a number, it won't wreck it. It’ll just look bad until its fixed. If it, say, has significant leading zerores, yes, it’ll wreck it, because excel defaults to dealing with numbers, not text, and there is a difference between text made up of digits and actual numbers.
> unless you take significant care to guard against it via formatting, special characters that trick it into using a string, etc
Knowing the shape of data you are entering and selecting a column and applying an appropriate format (including “text” as an option) before you enter any data (usually, to a whole column) isn’t that arduous.
The defaults should be sane - that's the point. What percentage of Excel users actually want data automatically converted into Scientific Notation? Close to zero I'd wager.
Your offered work-arounds only apply in a very narrow workflow. I work with Excel nearly every day, all kinds of files (CSV, TXT, XLS/X, etc). There's so many ways this issue can bite you unexpectedly - causing you to save and permanently destroy data.
If I type/paste/import/download/whatever `01234567890987654321` into a cell, 100% of the time I do not want `1.23+E18`. I don't want to even see that, I want to see the original value I entered.
It's asinine.
Excel may be the most used Office Suite app, but it's by far the most painful to use. The Excel Team has a long history of justifying downright perplexing behavior. Remember when Excel was the only Office app that didn't support Snap-To back in the Win Vista/7 days? Joel had a long-winded explanation that boiled down to "just cause"... it was perplexing even at the time. It really makes one wonder how bad the rat nest of a codebase Excel is.
"There's ways around our astonishing default behavior so just deal with it". That's not a great answer.
Okay, so set formats appropriate to what is useful for your data.
Defaults don't cover all cases, otherwise there would be no non-default options.
> It's asinine Excel has this behavior with any large number. Try to work with a list of EAN/UPC codes...
Codes aren’t numbers they are strings, even if the code is a sequence of digits. They should be formatted as text. For actual numbers that shouldn't be displayed in scientific missions, the appropriate numeric format does that.
> it'll wreck every single one every single time
If its any code that can be safely stored as a number, it won't wreck it. It’ll just look bad until its fixed. If it, say, has significant leading zerores, yes, it’ll wreck it, because excel defaults to dealing with numbers, not text, and there is a difference between text made up of digits and actual numbers.
> unless you take significant care to guard against it via formatting, special characters that trick it into using a string, etc
Knowing the shape of data you are entering and selecting a column and applying an appropriate format (including “text” as an option) before you enter any data (usually, to a whole column) isn’t that arduous.