What is the most frustrating thing about excel?

[ashakantasharma]

Excel seems to give you a two-second window at the start of a full workbook calculation cycle to instruct it to abort. If you miss that window, any further attempts to abort cause Excel to lock-up and white-out, and then you're stuck waiting for it to finish the full calculation cycle. This can be especially frustrating if you happen to have multiple workbooks open when Excel suddenly decides to auto-save and recalculate all formulas across all workbooks. It's even more frustrating if any of those open workbooks have calculation-intensive sensitivity tables or self-referencing cells. I've had to manually terminate Excel more times than I can count when this issue has cropped up in the middle of a time-sensitive analysis.

Incorrect reading of a date in dd/mm/yyyy format and then inability to change it through just one click: I had a csv file which had all dates in dd/mm/yyyy format, but when I copied it into excel, it read dates like the 1/12/2001 as 12-Jan-2001 and left dates like 14/5/2001 as is. Frustratingly, there is no one click solution to correct this, and I had to write long formulas to make excel read all the dates correctly.

 

[B___P]

@ashakantasharma to import date I use this
cells(r,c).formulalocal=yourvalue
This way I let excel to translate from USA standard

I have a background in economics and I hate not to use directly Financial formulas in excel.
When you calculate a monthly installment at a interest rate of 10%, excel uses 10%/12 and not
(1+0,10)^(1/12)-1 as the monthly interest rate. I hate to use extra cells to calculate input values.

 

[JonXL]

Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, and Assam El-Osta
Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature
Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature

Interesting to see a study backing what many of us already knew: the way Excel handles things that look like numbers is a problem indeed.

I've never had the need to enter a 15-digit number as a number - ever. The application needs some place to adjust defaults on this so I can specify business-specific settings on what is and what isn't to be treated as a number automatically.

 

[MARK858]

Frustratingly, there is no one click solution to correct this, and I had to write long formulas to make excel read all the dates correctly.

You can do it using the date settings in Text to Columns.

 

[limfoo]

Sometimes cell formats automatically default to "date" instead of "general."

 

[diddi]

i absolutely hate the way excel handles dates. it is hopeless in genealogy applications because dates prior to 1/1/1900 dont exist. also it does strange things when working with dates. they can swap formats without reason and confuse d/m with m/d and then the genealogy data is unreliable. i store all dates for genealogy in 3 cells ie d... m... y... because i do not trust excel to not misbehave. i have had million record data sets ruined because of excel randomly deciding that some dates dont look right and changing stuff.

 

[MARK858]

Write the dates as yyyy-mm-dd (ISO 8601), you won't get issues with the locale in that format.