Re: MS Excel Working As Designed

On 1/17/25 6:37 PM, Tyrone wrote:

On Jan 17, 2025 at 6:08:53 PM EST, "Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <ldo@nz.invalid>
wrote:
 

On Fri, 17 Jan 2025 21:46:39 +0000, Tyrone wrote:
>

Maybe if you read and learn FIRST, you would stop making a fool of
yourself.

>
Hard to believe it’s come to the point where the Microsoft marketing
machine has persuaded people that the ones pointing out the bug are the
“fools”, rather than the ones who were stupid enough to make it in the
first place.

 It was designed that way to be compatible with Lotus 1,2,3.  Multiplan (and
later Excel) HAD to be 100% compatible with that.

Huh.  That's a TIL for me.

This issue probably goes all the way back to the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc
in 1979 on the Apple II.  Lotus 1,2,3 was the IBM PC version of Visicalc in
1983.

Makes sense, even before contemplating if their original choice was motivated because of how limited memory/storage/etc was in that era, or just a lack of sophistication on leap year rules ... or both, since it was decades prior to Y2K awareness.

BTW, since LO does not follow this standard (as weird as it is), this is
probably yet another reason why businesses don't use it.

Well, in modern context it isn't all that hard (once one is aware of the limitation/requirement) to write some code that addresses 'special rules' of how to address dates earlier than 1 March 1900, including the compatibility layer for using files from other spreadsheet apps.
-hh