Re: The problem with not owning the software

Le 06-01-2025, DFS <guhnoo-basher@linux.advocaca> a écrit :

>
I entered a gene named 'March 2' (no apostrophes) into LO Calc and it
converted to a date.
>
That egregious data mangling issue would affect a whole lot of genetics
research work... if anyone was crazy enough to use LeeberOffice.

I have nothing to say about LibreOffice, but Excel is a piece of shit
about mangling data.

I'm not the only one to saw it. A French town had to change it's name
because of it:
<https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/insolite/dordogne-la-commune-de-faux-va-changer-de-nom-9432635>
And I'm not speaking about a very old issue, it just happened.
The name of the town, "Faux" is derived from the ancient name of a tree
and is the exact translation of "false" in English. And when the town
was concerned it's name either disappeared are were translated.

Personally, I have a lot of issues opening files with utf-8 data or with
fields separated by a ";" instead of a "," because the coma is the
French decimal point.

And for the end, as you are speaking about dates, as I wasn't able to
change the regional language of my computer for security reasons when I
used a Windows computer, I had no way to tell Excel the language of the
file. And with an English file opened on a french Windows, the only way
was to deal with the dates in a text editor before being able to open
them in Excel. Because, for example, when you have "JAN", as it's the
same for the beginning of French "Janvier" and for the beginning of the
English "January", it was translated into a date. But, then, the
beginning of the English "February" is "FEB", which is not the same as
the beginning of the French "Février" which is "FEV" or "FÉV" depending
of the context it was not changed. So, I had half of the dates changes
and the other half not changed.

So, maybe OnlyOffice mangles data, but I can assure you that Excel is
far from good in this game. I would prefer something that does nothing
with data and let me manage them by myself.

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