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Libre Office Calc covers 99% of what Excel use cases, has a very similar UI, and doesn't do secret magic guessing of whether a value is a date or not.

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>, and doesn't do secret magic guessing of whether a value is a date or not.

This Libre Office question&answer[1] in 2020 says it guesses that the users want leading zeros removed from numbers. This behavior is similar to other software tools I looked at.[2]

This means that if a csv has "02142021" as a date for Valentine's Day with a leading zero, it will be imported as number "2142021" -- unless one takes extra steps to prevent the default behavior.

[1] https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/246295/how-can-i-imp...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696732

Ok, it might try to deduce the data type, but you can set it in the import options that appear when you open a CSV file. Excel will automatically convert a string like "2-4" to "02-Feb" upon opening a CSV file. No import options appear when you open the file. If you then save the file it then uses that new string. As far as I can tell there's no way to stop it doing this.

Gnumeric or Tex combined with R can help also...

There is ages since I opened an excel and I don't miss it.

BRAVO for you. And I mean that. You've got the tool YOU need and you haven't pushed YOUR tool on other people. Thank you.

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