this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
212 points (95.3% liked)
Technology
60336 readers
4131 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I thought setting a column to string only was already possible.
You could already, after the fact, and per cell.
If you're importing 100,000 rows in, the damage to your data is already done by the time you're at the step where you can set the field to not convert.
It is, I've used that to prevent automatic removal of leading zeroes when reading the values of bytes.
Based on the article it seems like it's just a matter of not having to spend the time (and mental overhead) of doing that for all required columns and never slipping up on it (now just set and forget).
So did i. Format cell(s) > data type (or something) then just seleect text, or custom or whatever.
The problem happens with the anutonated import of data from a piece of equipment. It will be in .csv or .txt format. Excel will do the conversion as it tries to work out what is in each row or column.
The worksheet is then processed automatically by other software, so no human is there to find the row or column to change the format.
There’s an awful lot of data generated all the time so it would take too long to stop the automated process and manually change formats. Easier to rename the gene.