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Comment by thesuitonym | Hacker News Reader

If I type in 1/2, that means 1 divided by 2, or 0.5. If I then type +1, that means add 1.

1/2 I should never mean any kind of date, unless I'm entering it into a field that has already been declared a date field, or I have written that, then declared the field to be a date field.

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I think most people that enter `1/2` in a spreadsheet do indeed mean `January 2nd` and not `0.5`. In the wider world of people using spreadsheets, dates are certainly more common than fractions.

You're right about that, but maybe it should just treat '1/2' as '1/2' and only convert it if it makes sense for the current operation. If I type 1/2 and I want the date, then I want 1/2, not Feb 1, or Jan 2, or 01/02/2025, or 2025-02-01, unless again, I have explicitly specified that this cell is a date, and this is the format I want it in.

In Sweden we don't use that numbering scheme and instead use Day/Month Year (which makes more sense as it goes from smaller to larger).

I think it's just what you're used to. If counting from smallest to largest was inherently better, then a dozen would look like 21, not 12. Little vs Big Endian, I suppose.

The issue is when you do Month/Day/Year, then you lose consistency. Both Year/Month/Day or Day/Month/Year are more logical.

It would be interesting to know if your Excel correctly interprets 1/2 as 1st February based on your international settings.

Spoiler: it does.

Dates are often typed with slashes. Numbers are never typed with slashes in almost all business applications, and practically all likely uses of excel. Why should excel slow down people wanting to enter dates, a very common activity, to allow for you wanting to enter a fraction?

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