You can set that in the options somewhere. Referencing G4 is probably easier for most people than (7,4).

Why do you assume I’m doing this inside Excel? I was importing a data sheet into other software. By the time I got my hands on the data, it was an object of the sort {A: [/*data*/], AA: [/*data*/], B: [/*data*/]}. I had to sort the keys for presentation purposes.

In retrospect, sure, there would’ve been easier ways. But at the time I wasn’t aware yet that converting Excel columns to numeric indices isn’t as straightforward as a simple base conversion (like, e.g. from hex to decimal).

Pray tell how I would graph someone’s address.

Because I wasn’t even using Excel at that point. I was importing an excel sheet.

I had to use Excel today. That’s the reason.

And don’t forget that 1900 still is a leap year in Excel.

Thank you! Saying this finally made me realize why I always need to add/subtract one day when I’m trying to convert dates to and from the Excel representation. 🤦

I have been able to outsource low level parsing to third party libraries

Hahaha!!!

Today I watched a Java server crash because a library decided it needed more than 3GB of heap space to read a 10MB file. That was after manually removed background colors from around 100,000 cells, which apparently caused the parser to create even more objects in its internal representation of the sheet.

1: what the frick are you doing in Excel that needs even 10^2 columns?

Nothing. Here’s this meme’s origin story:

At work we have a tool that imports Excel spreadsheets into user-defined data records. We let the user decide which column goes into which record field.

Today I noticed that when you upload a spreadsheet with more than 26 columns (that is, you enter the double-digit range), the columns aren’t sorted anymore. (When I programmed that, stupid me thought that it was absolutely unreasonable to import 26 columns, given the way the data is processed later.) Instead of A…Z, AA, AB, …, it was A, AA, AB, B, C, ….

So I thought: I should fix that. It’s easy. Just convert the hexavigesimal system to decimal and sort based on that. I even was happy that I could apply some school knowledge for once. (It wasn’t all useless, yay!) Then my math wasn’t mathing. It took me a few minutes to find the system by which Excel columns are numbered. In the end I was annoyed that a task of 5 minutes took… longer… and made this meme.

By the way, to come back to the 10² columns: I’ll take any bet that such a spreadsheet will be shoved into the importer before I retire from my current company.

I thought about that, but decided to leave it as an exercise for the reader.

Don’t forget that Integer8 (the middle dragon) counts increments of 100 nanoseconds, because… reasons.

And don’t forget that 1900 still is a leap year in Excel.

“start of the century when we wrote it”

This meme wouldn’t exist had they done that. But they chose the zeroeth, not the first, of January for Excel.

Homophobe!

Same with chips or nuts.

strict ≠ abusive

I found Watchdogs 2 weird in this regard. You steal money from random people, who often struggle themselves, steal cars like nothing, murder a suburb’s worth of people, and still you’re “the good guys”?

I rounded the numbers to whole integers

whole integers, the best kind of integers

Why is that absurd?

Only you didn’t explain the number, and why it’s a fraction.

Windows runs better on Linux than on Windows…

Well, human children are fucking stupid. (A community that has no pendant in the fediverse, it seems)

Nowadays, to me, it’s a coin flip whether a tweet is fake or real. That’s not something I would’ve expected 5 years ago.