Re: """Standard""" software

On 2026-06-28, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> 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.

Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that tells cumbersome (usually GUI)
programs apart from more efficient tools. Is it at least available
through a single key chord for all columns? (I seem to recall an
auto-adjust feature, but that might be in OOo/LibO.)

>> 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.

IIRC it indeed was/is Excel.

They at one point also had VBA handle True as False (or the other way
around?) in amd64 builds in a specific context.

<https://www.theregister.com/software/2021/08/19/eight-year-old-bug-in-microsofts-64-bit-vba-prompts-complaints-of-neglect/1335886>
-- 
Nuno Silva