13 April 2013

Microsoft: taking imbecility to a new level


I am sure that every user of Excel has noticed that it's been designed by extreme date-whores. Whenever there is the remotest possibility of interpreting an input as a date, Excel automatically displays it as a date. Needless to say, the user is not allowed to turn off such a vital function.

I have thought for a long time that Excel's AI (artificial idiocy) can no longer surprise me. I was wrong. Today, it did something truly hilarious. I wanted to enter the number "3,3" (I use the comma as decimal point), but mistakenly typed "3.3". Of course it wouldn't occur to the AI to interpret is as a number. No, it corrects two initial capitals all right, but the idea that one could accidentally press "." instead of "," (or vice versa) is beyond the Microsoft programmers. So, it goes without saying that "3.3" means the 3rd March, right? Right. Except that in this case, I had the cell formatted as number with 2 decimal places. So Excel... no-no, it did not turn my input into "3,30". Get real. It turned the DATE into a number and so displayed "41366,00".

I think Microsoft has earned an honourable place in the history of medicine, because clearly it has discovered a form of mental retardation so far unknown to the science.

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