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At one job doing data centre forensics I had spent like half a year building up excel spreadsheets on what needed to be investigated... Then I realized the date formats were American, so I changed my system clock to use dd/mm/yyyy instead...

This automatically mangled the date in every single file I opened from there on and left me having to redo all that work. Fun!

A bunch of what I do for work right now is writing code which actually generates spreadsheets for end users to use but personally I wish that Excel was more like a relational database with more data safety guarantees and I'm glad I don't have to use it every day.

Has Microsoft integrated python into it yet? Does that embedding come with a full networking stack? That choice always struck me as kinda wild, as if there isn't enough security problems as-is with this stuff... It kind of seems like Microsoft's whole plan to make Excel more secure is trying to move everyone to that cloudy office 365, but I just use libreoffice anyways



I always assume that if dates/times aren't ISO 8601, then they're not in the format I'm expecting.


Better reject those ISO8601 timestamps if they don't have time zone specifiers too! In one case, I wrote an API that rejected anything that wasn't in UTC time just to make everyone's life equally uncomfortable.




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