People choose these system with loose conversions over and over again because it's an advantage up to a point. Of course it becomes a liability when expanded too much and used in now critical systems, but IMHO the tradeoff usually ends as a net positive. Which is why, over and over we build more of these systems, and they fare better in the market than the stricter ones.
That's a hell of a claim to try and demonstrate when its initial advantage is far from obvious to begin with.
A) I have no clue where you got this from. It seems like a convenient assumption, but not one that's easily verified, especially when folks are introduced to the dangers of such an approach.
B) Giving people control over how the data is interpreted outside of the default interpretation seems like a no-brainer. I don't really rely on default interpretation of anything, especially in the context of spreadsheets given how eager they are to interpret data in unexpected ways, but based on this thread it seems like it's rather difficult to turn off the date conversion behavior in excel.
C) I was replying to a comment about implicit conversions, which is far larger than just the context of excel spreadsheets.
As a workflow, if every time you create a new spreadsheet you first define all the column types and constraints, you're in the world you're describing. Passing around that spreadsheet would also keep these settings as long as it's not converted and everyone's version is compatible.
That means you get the best of both worlds: people who care about strict types can be as strict as they want, other people can benefit from auto conversions.
Is this some kind of joke? Ever used Excel?
There doesn't have to be a tradeoff if you make it optional.
- people love to export as CSV. And I kinda understand them, csv looks simple enough, what could go wrong ?
- other spreadsheet softs need to recognize the same field and act the same way. Google Sheets, LibreOffice, KingSoft's one etc. Not counting old office versions that aren't updated anymore, because the owner doesn't want to move into the cloud.
- the flag needs to stay when moving sheets around, copy to another set, etc.
That could still be better than nothing. But could still lead to catastrophic loses as people get used to it working most of the time, there's no perfect solution.
This would also offer the path for changing the default over time to safe by default. There will be more spreadsheets created in the future than exist now.
They already added an option in the settings last year to deal with this specific issue. Their solution isn't perfect either, they made the tradeoff to optimize for up to date excel users.
Also keep in mind that the first person doesn't necessarily use excel at all. The file might start and end as a text file or TSV.
Right Click > Format Cells > Text.
Set the data type of the column and Excel will not fiddle with it. Let it stay implicit and Excel will to guess. This change is saved in the file. The article only slightly touches on this: converting to CSV and losing all the Excel formatting and then opening it in Excel again.
Just because they have something they call CSV import or export doesn't mean the feature actually works.
An option was added last year [0] the way you propose it, but until then users already had the option to mark the columns as text. The same way we have to deal with any data where auto detection might be problematic: explicitely set a type, and potentially a format.
But of course that's bothersome, sometime people forget to do it, sometimes they don't even know how to properly do it etc. And some of these people will still probably forget to set the option, and there are still edge cases where it can fail (macros are cited)
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/21/23926585/microsoft-excel...
This only works on Excel files though, which save a type for columns/cells. With CSV files, Excel would just auto-format them. I guess you could save everything as xls/xlsx, but I shouldn't have to use a vendors file format because they're threatening to corrupt my data if I don't.
I don't want Excel to take over the file association for .json but I do sometimes wish Excel would just invent a file extension like .xljson that loads JSON so that at least you could trivially rename a JSON file to .xljson and get working double-click for your business users but a file format (with optional schema support even) that's a more modern and saner de facto standard than CSV.
I think that one dumb trick would improve everyone's productivity a great deal.
If the excel developers cared about CSV support they would have added more settings to the CSV import tool that let you specify everything. Every single data base tool that lets you import CSV files has worked better than Excel. It simply means Excel wasn't built to import CSV files. Tough luck.
.xlsx file extension is well supported by many open source libraries. If you insist on working with Excel then you should use the appropriate file format, which is .xlsx. I do that all the time and it just works.
or they dont know any better.
The world is full of antipatterns that people implement with little, no, or flawed analysis. They do not fare better in the market, they propagate the same way entropy does.