Re: The pain of Excel

On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 17:43:31 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

Yes, I got into them early - and found it was a short easy step to CSV,
so now my stuff can be read by the people in spreadsheet land. I have,
however, had to put a fair amount of effort into what I call
"Excel-proofing" my data, since our favourite Redmond software company
loves meddling with it.

I found, years ago, that outputting SYLK format was a fairly robust
way of generating data for use by the spreadsheet folks. But that
doesn’t seem to be well-known these days.

Trying to “Excel-proof” data is generally regarded as a futile
exercise. The logical answer would be “use a better tool than Excel”,
but there seems to be a Gresham’s Law of IT interoperability, where
the mediocre, Microsoft-based product pushes out the higher-quality
alternatives ...

<https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008984>