Excel has a thing for getting dates wrong (the (in)famous 1900 leap-year bug, inherited from Lotus 1-2-3 and never fixed), and when Excel gets dates wrong, no other software does it worse. [..] The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee was forced in 2020 to rename dozens of human genes – including SEPT1 and MARCH1 – because Excel kept silently converting their symbols to dates. Rather than going to Microsoft and demanding a bug fix, scientists preferred to throw years of established nomenclature down the drain to avoid upsetting RedmondI really like these two examples, not because of the issues as such, but as two examples of how people usually handle bugs in proprietary software: ignore them or work around them, but almost never complain about the software.MS Office is always mentioned as the standard, and everything has to be as good as MS Office if people consider different solutions. But in the end, it's not because MS is so much better. People are just used to it and how to work around strange issues that they would never accept in a Free Software solution.https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/05/15/no-digital-sovereignty-without-odf/#OpenStandards #ODF #OOXML #Microsoft #Office #FreeSoftware
