Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thirdsun 2082 days ago
Does it? I think it should treat everything as a string since it can't be certain about the correct type. It could also suggest the correct type rather than applying it without user confirmation.
1 comments

You want Excel to auto-interpret a table of numbers, that come from a CSV, as entirely text?

Looking forward to the first time anyone tries to use your excel on a table of numbers and then immediately has to multiply everything by *1 (in a separate table) just to get it back into numbers...

Oh yes please.

At least you would know what's happening and be in control of it

"Hey, is that a date? I bet that's a date!" - Aaaargh Noooo!

YES!! I seem to remember a few versions of Excel ago there was a way to import data and set the data type for each column in a preview window to see what it would look like. And to your point, it's very easy to select an existing column in Excel and change the data type anyway. So why not just make everything a string by default?
Maybe you recall the CSV import window in libreoffice