Re: """Standard""" software (was: Re: Early-2014 Macbook Air and Linux Mint Cinnamon)

On 2026-06-28 18:09:45 +0000, Charlie Gibbs said:

> On 2026-06-27, Your Name <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On 2026-06-27 18:22:31 +0000, Charlie Gibbs said:
>> 
>>> In fact, I prefer LibreOffice's spreadsheet to Excel, primarily because 
>>> when I pull in a CSV file it automatically sets the column widths to 
>>> something reasonable, rather than requiring you to manually select the 
>>> hilariously-misnamed "Auto format".
>> 
>> Column widths are easily fixed quickly in Excel. Just click in the 
>> corner "cell" above the row numbers and left of the column letters to 
>> select the entire spreadsheet, then double-click the divider between 
>> any column.
> 
> Quickly?  That sound pretty laborious to me, especially if there are a 
> lot of columns that need adjusting. If I'm forced to deal with Excel in 
> this situation, I select the entire spreadsheet and then use the 
> above-mentioned "Auto format".  LibreOffice gets it right in the first 
> place - no manual adjustments required.

If you select the entire spreadsheet, then you only need to 
double-click *ONE* column divider between the letter headings and ALL 
the columns will self-fit to the correct width. (Text wrapping can 
cause an issue though, so that may need to be turned off first, but it 
is usually off by default for new documents, unless the defaults have 
been manually changed at some point.)

Double-clicking the cell divider will change only the cell widths. 
Auto-format may well change other things as well.




>> Similarly for row heights, although you may need to turn on the 
>> text-wrapping for all the cells first.
>> 
>> The biggest issue with Excel is that it is simply not accurate, and 
>> therefore untrustworthy. Because Microsoft stubbornly chose to do 
>> decimal arithmatic in stupid way, that they claim is a "feature", it 
>> means miniscule errors creep in, which can then get bigger when using 
>> those error cells in other calculations. No other spreadsheet (or 
>> database) that I've used has had this problem because they do decimal 
>> arithmatic properly.
> 
> Was Excel the one that thinks 1900 is a leap year?  Or was that some 
> other M$ program?  I once wound up with a lot of dates that were a day 
> off thanks to that one, whichever program did it.

I don't know about that problem. It's not something I came across, but 
it wouldn't surprise me.