andrewducker | (Reply)

From:

Excel date conversions have been a known bug for a quarter of a century, and the largest corporate users have tried to raise the issue with Microsoft repeatedly...

And they haven't fixed it now:

The feature does not support disabling these conversions during macro execution.

...And that's half of the automated bulk database imports, right there.

The other half is database drivers that read spreadsheets directly into database tables and queries, and SSIS (SQL Server's data import toolkit); there's no mention of the 'fix' for that, and the high-profile Excel errors in genetics are set in stone during bulk data imports.

Beyond that, there is no mention of Microsoft's failure to follow the ASCII standard for CSV data files; and I'm not convinced that anyone in Redmond actually knows what happens out of sight in Excel's idiosyncratic implementation of copy-and-paste.