

Excel spreadsheets are hard to get right - jmount
http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2014/11/excel-spreadsheets-are-hard-to-get-right/

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baking
Apparently words are hard to get right too. The last sentence of the first
paragraph makes no sense in many different ways and the link is bad too.

EDIT: Actually the HTML is mangled and a huge chunk of text is not visible.

~~~
jmount
Yah, sorry about that. It looked okay in my authoring tool, but it was wrong
(fixed now).

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NamTaf
I don't see the problem. A true / false convention of 1 / 0 is not uncommon
(nor is its inverse, but pick one) and so excel stores it as thus. Whether it
displays as 'TRUE' / 'FALSE' or 1 / 0 is then determined by formatting, which
is sensible.

The same would apply with dates. Datetimes are zero-indexed floating point
numbers incrementing from 0/1/1900 [1]. Whether it's displayed as a date or
number is simply a case of what format you select for the cell.

Formatting is then obviously specified as a flag in the metadata because by
its nature, formatting is metadata not a value. If you implied formatting by
the value stored, you open up all kinds of corner case issues (is "19/5/14",
for example, an equation, date or string?).

I think the .xlsx format is really sensible here, and it's the applications
that have woeful compatibility.

[1] Yes, 0th January is a date:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_0)

------
nn3
Welcome to 2014! Where simple bugs are not reported anymore, but instead being
written up in sensational blog posts.

~~~
jmount
Well from the Libre Office site: "The BSA is currently broken. Please use
[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffi...](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffice&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED)
instead. We are sorry for the inconvenience." And then "Bugzilla needs a
legitimate login and password to continue." I already have way too many
accounts to manage to create yet another one to submit the bug report.

But I took your advice and submitted the bug
[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86456](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86456)

edit: and a whopping 1 minute in somebody has linked an empty bug report as a
duplicate to this one. nice.

