>Excel is fine for the home user. But the implicit conversions of input data can play havoc with any complex analysis.
Can you not turn all of that off (and only need to turn it off once per sheet/file)?
Can you not turn all of that off (and only need to turn it off once per sheet/file)?
In general, one of the worst things about Excel is there's no obvious way to lock anything to keep it from getting changed by accident.
Heck, even integration has been re-discovered and published:
https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
If the tool doesn't work correctly by default. Then it's likely the wrong tool for the job.
The default conversions are fine for 99% of use-cases. But no one should mistake Excel for a robust data analysis tool.
I would be worried about endless forking of defaults as a feature of newly built tools, leading to a bunch of new tools that will be harder to maintain.
If they can't manage implicit data casting preferences (if those exist, they may not), surely handing them something more complicated like R, MATLAB, or SQL is even worse.