• mercano@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    There’s a long-standing bug in Excel, dating back to the original release, where it thinks 1900 is a leap year. This isn’t a mistake, though, Microsoft coded it this way because Lotus 1-2-3 thought 1900 was a leap year, and they wanted to be compatible so they could import Lotus spread sheets. However, by doing this, they locked themselves in, and they need to continue to have this bug even today to be compatible with old Excel spreadsheets.

    https://sachinlearns.medium.com/the-100-year-bug-microsoft-never-fixed-how-excel-still-carries-a-mistake-from-the-1980s-5fe4dcaedc7d

    • Pippipartner@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      Biggest commercial supplier of OS and surrounding software suits. Everybody think Microsoft Windows is a computer, same as WiFi = Internet. International trade is based on Excel, science, probably government and your Warhammer 40k Army list as well. Can’t properly determine leap year.

      (Also when dumping genetic strings, these long AAACGCG, into Excel it turns them into dates silently. Which has ruined the reproducibility of genetics research since forever.)

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Don’t remind me of that. I wrote a spreadsheed spread over about ten files (for memory size reasons, and they had maxxed out the memory on the machine already). Every month, some poor being had to type in the results from the mainframe printouts into one sheet, then the data was referenced through a bunch of intermediate sheets that distributed the numbers in very creative ways, and then a final spreadsheet was called up to get all numbers referenced together to print them into the proper forms. Luckily there was some field referencing across files, or that would have become a real nightmare.