Hello everybody,
What is the company and corporation that is the object of your hate? What did/do they do to get that spot for you?
Mine is Facebook/Meta for their egregious data collection policies, psychological manipulation of its users, and more recently, them not seeding content.
Thanks in advance for your time! Have a good one!
The program generates a report for us once a month. It can be generated as an excel file or as another file type which we cannot use. When it generates the excel file it breaks a bunch of numbers that are used often and all throughout our data as excel thinks they are dates. When we try and reverse any of those numbers in all the many ways people have recommended the data never goes back all correctly. So I have to manually replace the data cell by cell afterwards.
We are unable to preemptively format any settings in excel to prevent this from happening.
There once was a beta version of excel that had the exact feature we need (excel leaves all data untouched unless told otherwise), but for some godforsaken reason Microsoft got rid of that setting.
I suggest making a script to fix it, rather than fix it manually. It is very easy to use, so basically program then export to excel then run officescript. Also don’t tell anyone you made a script, tell them you are doing it manually.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/overview/excel
The data is different every month. It’s not consistent month to month so it can’t be automated in any way.
But you use the same column correct? and the data that is messed up is the same type? Unless the data that is messed up is very hard to detect using a script, it should be possible.
The data that needs to be fixed changes locations on the spreadsheet monthly. It’s never the same two months in a row
Look I appreciate your trying to help, but after 3 months of calls and emails back and forth with several people at Microsoft as well as our company’s 3rd party IT guys (I’m the in house IT guy) we have just determined that the only way to get it done is to have me spend a couple hours once a month un fucking the data that excel chewed up.
It is what it is.
This is probably a dumb question, and there’s likely a very good reason why this can’t be done, but can you not generate an Excel file from one of the other formats yourself? E.g. have the program output a CSV and write a python script that parses it into an excel file. That way you might have more control over the generated Excel and maybe be able to do it automatically.
Yep, export to CSV, format as desired, save in Excel format?
Might be annoying to format it but I would guess it is easier than having to change data?
He can also use an alternative to excel like OpenOffice or libreoffice, I don’t know why would they would use excel when it causes issues.
Maybe the output to managers needs to be Excel for some reason, e.g. there’s some processing afterwards with another closed tool.
There is many formats that excel uses, the issue is probably with XLSX format, my guess the problem will be solved by either using a different software or changing the format to csv. If Microsoft doesn’t want to bother solving the problem. It is very hard to pinpoint the exact problem without seeing the program, but I will never do something like this manually, I will probably make a script to fix it.
Must be the export into an Excel file that breaks it. By that point, an alternative reader won’t help.
I think you mean export to xls, also each program will have a different way for exporting. It might be that the way excel does it breaks it.