Haranguing your users not to make mistakes is utterly worthless. The only way to move the needle is to design systems that are easier to use correctly.
It's not like you have to be in genetics for excel to bite you. I once had a “business” column in a CSV with one cell set to July 11. Why? Because the business was 7/11. (I assume in a different locale it would've become November 7?)
The simple solution is to do what every CSV → DataFrame library does, which is ensure columns are a homogenous type. In this case a single non-date entry in a column would be enough to treat the whole column as string.
This is an awful mindset and I'm tired of people acting like tools only ever have pre-defined purpose and you need a special purpose tool to do anything. Also that's a dumb analogy. Here's a better one: A knife that breaks 20% of the time when you try to cut pork, because you didn't buy a separate pork-cutting knife.
I'm not doing anything nearly as special and always have dates import as numbers for whatever reason. Thanks microsoft.
How a knife that breaks 0.00001% of the times because it’s used a billion times a day?
If excel broke 20% of the time, I’d agree. But it rarely breaks. It’s just widely used.
I’ve used Excel for decades. I just set the data types on my columns. The reason Excel does that is because the vast majority of people like it and rely on it. And changing it now will break millions of workflows.
People assume their workflow is super important and worthy of software making special exceptions just for them. There’s an easy solution that people can follow now. Let’s focus on that rather than introducing a “fix” that breaks it for other people.
Excel has thought about this and there’s no simple fix. Nobody is forced to use Excel.
> Also that's a dumb analogy. Here's a better one: A knife that breaks 20% of the time when you try to cut pork, because you didn't buy a separate pork-cutting knife.
Excel doesn’t break 20% of the time. It rarely breaks. I think you’re assuming that genetics is more worthwhile than the millions of other uses. Think about how widely it’s used and your analogy doesn’t work very well.
I don’t think it would have much of an impact. And I hate those forced wizards and tutorials as I use excel in lots of environments.
I remember Excel team writing about why they didn’t have advanced settings to turn it off. I don’t remember the rationale but I’d rather have some switches I can set for the situations where I don’t want it.
Although I do want it on and just check my data types. And for the most part I solved this by opening and never editing in Excel. It seems to be the one hack I’ve gotten coworkers to stick with is “don’t click save” when opening large files in Excel.
Ideally on the screen UI only those things are shown, that are relevant in the context.
And the context of beginners is very small, so they don't need to see advanced tools they never will use anyway. But for sure it is not the right way to also remove the tools for the advanced users who do need them.
But it is possible to make UIs that can be customized ..
Do you think the comment is written by Microsoft??? The sloppy researchers are not his users.
Another way to move the needle is to place higher value on technical competence.
