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!

  • @moakley@lemmy.world
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    06 months ago

    There is definitely a way to automate that process. Even if you can’t somehow sanitize the input before Excel reads it as dates, unfucking the data can definitely be reduced to a single button-push. I’ve based my entire career on my ability to do that.

    • Majorllama
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      06 months ago

      I have had an untold number of coders and Microsoft experts look at this problem. There is nothing that can be done.

      Program 1 cannot be changed as the job requires it and it will only automatically spit out into excel. Excel immediately breaks several numbers across the spreadsheet by turning them into dates. Nobody at Microsoft can get the sheets to revert back into the original data correctly. Nothing can be done to preemptively format excel not to fuck the dates.

      • @moakley@lemmy.world
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        06 months ago

        What do you mean “spit out”? Is it being put into a new open workbook, an existing open workbook, or is it being saved as a file?

        And I don’t mean to suggest I know better than the person actually dealing with the situation (I hate when people do that), but if you can do it manually, it can be automated.

        • Majorllama
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          06 months ago

          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.

            • Majorllama
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              06 months ago

              The data is different every month. It’s not consistent month to month so it can’t be automated in any way.

              • @themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                06 months ago

                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.

                • Majorllama
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                  06 months ago

                  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.

          • @Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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            06 months ago

            It can be generated as an excel file or as another file type which we cannot use.

            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.

            • @themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              6 months ago

              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.

              • @Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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                06 months ago

                Maybe the output to managers needs to be Excel for some reason, e.g. there’s some processing afterwards with another closed tool.