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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.


What are you talking about? You responded to the wrong person because this has nothing to do with what I said.


> 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.




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