Excel is a wonderful tool. But you need to learn your tools and find out about possible footguns.
It's entirely valid for the school to tell students to avoid easily avoidable pitfalls.
There is one effect: it allows smug gloating about how stupid, lazy, and irresponsible these users are.
Blaming the user is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Why then is it the dominating mindset in software design today, and advertised as being the opposite to the mindset that gives you Excel?
It’s like people complaining because sugar gets misused. Or that murderers stab people with knives. The solutions isn’t to “fix” knives.
The simple solution is to do what every CSV → DataFrame library does, which is ensure columns are a homogenous type. In this case a single non-date entry in a column would be enough to treat the whole column as string.
I remember Excel team writing about why they didn’t have advanced settings to turn it off. I don’t remember the rationale but I’d rather have some switches I can set for the situations where I don’t want it.
Although I do want it on and just check my data types. And for the most part I solved this by opening and never editing in Excel. It seems to be the one hack I’ve gotten coworkers to stick with is “don’t click save” when opening large files in Excel.
I'm not doing anything nearly as special and always have dates import as numbers for whatever reason. Thanks microsoft.
If excel broke 20% of the time, I’d agree. But it rarely breaks. It’s just widely used.
I’ve used Excel for decades. I just set the data types on my columns. The reason Excel does that is because the vast majority of people like it and rely on it. And changing it now will break millions of workflows.
People assume their workflow is super important and worthy of software making special exceptions just for them. There’s an easy solution that people can follow now. Let’s focus on that rather than introducing a “fix” that breaks it for other people.
Excel has thought about this and there’s no simple fix. Nobody is forced to use Excel.
Excel doesn’t break 20% of the time. It rarely breaks. I think you’re assuming that genetics is more worthwhile than the millions of other uses. Think about how widely it’s used and your analogy doesn’t work very well.
If you do it like most software vendors do, by simplifying and removing functionality, you're moving the needle in the wrong direction.
Ideally on the screen UI only those things are shown, that are relevant in the context.
And the context of beginners is very small, so they don't need to see advanced tools they never will use anyway. But for sure it is not the right way to also remove the tools for the advanced users who do need them.
But it is possible to make UIs that can be customized ..