Reply to post: Re: Devil's advocate

Excel hell messes up ~20 per cent of genetic science papers

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Devil's advocate

The main and default data type for a spreadsheet cell is number. Users have to understand this. That's why any spreadsheet I used (1-2-3, Quattro, Excel) attempts to treat everything as a plain number, upon which calculations can be performed. A 'classic' spreadsheet contains mostly numbers, and a few text labels. Then people started to use them to tabulate data (because the forgot what the TAB key on the keyboard was used for), a database replacement. You can blame the software if it can't infer what you're typing is not a mathematical number but a telephone number. You have to tell it. I'm still surprised how many computer users (and developers) don't understand the difference between a data type and its on screen display. A numeric cell is not just a simple string of numbers.

Dates are different thing, it's just a helper that people should learn how to disable when needed.

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