Ludicrous data formatting in Excel

[LitmusDragon]

Did you know ...

If you input a number string into Excel in format xx-xxxx it always assumes it's a date?

So when I input number 10-4217 for example, or even 10-6230, like I'm doing for a special project, it helpfully changes the field to read "Oct-30".

Thanks, Excel, for auto-formatting my carefully laid plans for the seventh millennium.

PS- is there any possible reason anyone on the planet would ever want to make a spreadsheet containing dates dealing with the seventh millennium? I doubt even the Founders planned things that far ahead.

In a similar vein, have you ever noticed in a program where the default feature is absolutely unhelpful and couldn't possibly be what the operator was looking for? I'm sure I'm forgetting other examples.

 

[Vulcan Princess]

That "feature" drives me crazy, too. If you don't need to run formulas on it, you can format the cells to treat it as text. Then it will stop changing your data.

 

[milo bloom]

As noted, you tell Excel to treat certain entries as text, among other forms.

In a similar vein, have you ever noticed in a program where the default feature is absolutely unhelpful and couldn't possibly be what the operator was looking for? I'm sure I'm forgetting other examples.

I hope I'm not the only one with this one: I can't stand how Outlook always goes looking for the absolute oldest thing you have in deep, deep, deeper than Deep 13 storage when you tell it to search for something, but I'm really just looking for something similar from last week. Am I the only one that thinks this is annoying?

 

[cultcross]

Excel is bloody annoying when it comes to auto-recognising formats. It takes 10-6253 as a date but can't figure out that 20091004 is a date, but reversed.
Well that's not true, and that's what actually bugs me the most - if you do Text To Columns and tell it its a date, suddenly it can recognise it as a date and switch it to a format of your choice (DMY, MDY, etc) instantly.
A particular gripe of mine from work is the lack of support for phone numbers on Excel; as a number, the default when a phone number is entered, Excel will drop the leading zero. Convert it to text format and you get constant error messages telling you NUMBER STORED AS TEXT. There is a custom format that can display them correctly, but would it be that hard to incorporate support and recognition for phone numbers into Excel? To recognise say 07456783312 (made up, don't try it ) is a phone number and allow the leading zero? Maybe it coudl even incorporate a gap to separate area code and display the entry as "07456 783312" but without having to store it as just general text?