Microsoft Excel is an interesting application in the sense that it is perceived by users. It is largely seen as a kind of supervitamin calculator, and of course somewhat complex. There are others who just don’t like Microsoft’s spreadsheet solution, and finally there are those of us who believe that a day we’ve used Excel at least once is a day we haven’t used it to its full potential. And mind you, the head of Microsoft is one of us.

The enormous flexibility of Excel along with the myriad of features and tools it has, hHe believes that the number of uses we can give it is gigantic. From basic calculations to AI features, data inspection tools… wow, we even got to see them create a playable version of X-COM in Excel a few years ago that offered a more fun and complete experience despite the obvious limitations.

One of its many advantages is that it allows us to manage huge volumes of data that we can process for the purpose we want, and in the vast majority of cases the result will be completely satisfactory. However, There are times when the tool can turn against us, although this is obviously a mistake. And you may remember, a few years ago we repeated a very famous case where Excel, if not properly configured to avoid this, modified items when it thought they corresponded to a type of information that it actually did not.

It’s been a long-standing problem that has been a bit of a pain for the scientific community. But yes, you read that right, I’m talking in the past tense because, as you can read on the Microsoft 365 Insiders blog, Microsoft has improved Excel users’ control over automatic format conversions. The rollout of this change has already started and is rolling out to both Windows and macOS users. To do this, you need to make sure you have the following versions of Excel:

• Windows– Version 2309 (build 16808.10000) or later.
• Mac Operating System– Version 16.77 (build 23091003) or later.

This innovation is undoubtedly most useful when the data is written directly into the application, but there is an improvement that I find particularly noteworthy, which we can read in the mentioned publication, and that is that we can configure Excel to inform us of any automatic conversion that occurs when importing data from a file in csv or txt format, which is a fairly common operation in research processes, and therefore the space in which this problem regularly occurred.