It's not working for me. I have those all unticked but if I create a new file and go to cell A1 and type 1/2, it puts 2-Jan in the cell rather than the text I want.
If I then put 60/100 in cell A2, it doesn't do any conversion.
Then put the formula "=Search("/", A1)" in cell B1 and copy that to cell B2, B1 evaluates to #VALUE! and B2 evaluates to 3.
You're not responding to the part where parent says the result is not 1/2 as in 0.5 but 2-Jan. The boobytrapped date parsing appears to be still happening even with "Automatic Data Conversions" disabled.
I understood that 1/2 converts to 2-Jan (or 1-Feb depending on settings).
That is desired behaviour. If you want the string 1/2 you need to use an apostrophe. If you want the fraction one half you need to use an equals sign. Both of these are vastly less likely to be what a user wants than the date interpretation, so it makes sense for that to be the default.
Not sure about an Excel workbook file like xlsx but for something like a CSV there is no way to attach that preference to the file so Excel will continue to mangle data as it always has unless everyone who touches it updates their settings.
The meaning of a value (data type in programming lingo) is not a preference because it is objective, not subjective. It depends on the cell being displayed, not on the viewer in front of the screen.
It's not a setting which determines how a value stored in a sheet is interpreted. It's a setting which determines how inputs are interpreted before being stored.
When you type eg "4/4", "4-Apr", "2025-04-04" or whatever, it is converted to a number based on your local date format. The cell has a date format applied to it so that the number appears as a date. If you send the sheet to someone else, it will display the same numeric value, using their settings to display it as a date.
But GP isn't talking about value, they are talking about process of entering the value, so that _their_ editor (Excel) wouldn't convert it to something weird.
More like I wrote some python code, and want to ensure the IDE doesn't change spaces to tabs. Night theme vs day theme is orthogonal to the code. Date parsing in Excel is not.
Come on, there is no room for anyone to have a preference here when an excel document is meant to be storing the names of genes and would never need to have a date or time in it, and can very easily get corrupted beyond repair if someone turns date conversion on. (For context, genome research is the whole reason this toggle was added in the first place.) Even something like Vim lets you enforce file-specific settings with a header.
At the same time, we're clearly shooting ourselves in the foot by using Excel for this. This feature is just a hodge-podge solution to the problem of Excel not having strict data types. There should be enough cautionary tales (https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/) for everyone to know to avoid Excel.
Excel is not designed to waste the time of frequent, experienced users while hand-holding casual users. It's designed to make power users very fast and accurate while possibly confusing casual and new users.
Well, no, it isn't because Excel actually changes the underlying data too. It's more like changing the formatting of all the files in the project and deleting all the characters after the 80th column.
I just tested it. The setting applies on data entry but opening a CSV or similar delimited file counts as “data entry”. So if you work strictly with xlsx files you are fine but it will irreversibly convert the values on open for delimited files unless you change the defaults.
If it provides any comfort, Excel in turn is unable to properly open/save a CSV with the separator being a comma (!) unless the regional settings of Windows are not defining it as such.
On german systems it's for example a semicolon, so a CSV is basically a "semicolon separated value" file, and there is no working solution around that...
A comma separated CSV with decimal numbers uses a dot as a decimal point (US regional setting)
A German CSV uses a semicolon as a separator and a comma as a decimal point (German regional setting)
To create a US-style CSV on a German PC (with expectation to create a common CSV format) you need to change the regional setting of Windows before opening Excel...
Even worse is converting all numeric-looking strings to numbers, even if it requires truncation. If you use long strings of digits as identifiers, such as in billing systems, the actual transaction identifier will be mangled by Excel.
It’s my understanding that debt is mostly held in the US by Americans and that a country that runs a debt in a currency it controls isn’t anything like household debt.
That said, what would it mean for the US to go bankrupt?
Many also need to learn that there are configuration settings on their compilers that make those two cases the same, enabling bounds checking on operator[]().
Sure, but at() is guaranteed to throw an exception and operator[] can throw an exception when you go out of bounds. C++26 is tweaking this, but it's still going to differ implementation to implementation.
At least that's my understanding of the situation. Happy to be corrected though.
What you see as an interruption is somebody else clearing their path. It could be that your personal productivity drop is resulting in a productivity gain for the group.
> I could pull this off only because my commute was short
The other critical factor was sharing a space with somebody who wanted to work in a similar way. If you shared that space with somebody who was significantly more or less social, the impedance mismatch could have been very negative.
I thought it was pretty neat and think they did a good job of creating that vibe. I have fond memories of that time and the computers and the electronics magazines.
As for the heaviness of the page… My 8 year old iPad loaded it just fine, so it couldn’t have been all that heavy.
Because you want to be able to log the calories/nutrients of the food you're eating before it's cooked into a dish.
You don't want to have to cook your bacon and then measure its mass before you know how many calories it has when you can just log the raw form before you cook it.
Sure you do. And if you don't consume all of the grease, then you have some overestimation error in your tracking which is evened out by (but usually dominated by) all of your underestimation errors, like every time you forget to log the squirts of oil in the pan or that handful of mixed nuts or every time you eat out.
Having to cook your food first, take it out, measure it, and put it back in the dish you're making before you can estimate content doesn't seem like a recipe (pun) for habit forming here. Nor is it viable for anything but the most basic dishes like individually pan frying large ingredients.
Almost every protein that I consume is weighed raw for ease in logging. One reason is if you are cooking a dish with e.g. bacon as an ingredient, you may not be able or want to separate it out at the end. Likewise, if I sauté chicken breasts in a pan and then finish the dish with other ingredients, I probably want to just eat the food and not deal with weighing them after water loss. Providing both just provides greater ease in logging your meals and is exact-enough for most people :)
Mail it to me and I will take care of it for you ;)
Kidding, of course. Here's what I recommend:
The single best thing you can do for your machine is get a SATA SSD into it. That will 10x the performance of your system for most tasks immediately. After that, max out your RAM at 16GB DDR3.
Assuming a 500GB SSD, you can do both of these things using new parts for less than $100, and if you get used parts, for less than $50.
A system with a 2nd-gen i5 or especially i7, 16GB RAM, and 500GB SSD storage will be fast enoug for essentially every modern computing task that isn't modern gaming, graphic design, video editing, or complex programming (it'll be good enough for simple coding tasks). You can do whatever else you want.
As far as batteries, my recommendations are twofold: Get the highest-wattage charger you can (probably a 170watt for the T520, I think) and the largest battery possible. New ones are available on eBay. You want the "extended life" models. They're not great, but they should get you a few hours of usage. Depending on what you get and where it's from, it's another $20-$50.
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