Office 2011: Really? Really?

CubaMark · Sep 27, 2017

wonderings said:
I cannot imagine using Word for anything but text. In my opinion if you are wanting to mix text and images you need a page layout program.

Word struggles to do basic page layout correctly (something we could do in friggin' ClarisWorks and AppleWorks!), but it's not out of its declared capabilities. I'm not asking it to do anything extraordinary! But in academia our documents typically are text-heavy with varying amounts of charts and tables, sometimes photographs. When we get to the level of preparing books, on the author's end we submit a fairly detailed collection of files according to the publisher's specifications (most often tables / charts / photos are provided separately, at proper resolutions, with in-text markers to show where a given element should be placed). The publisher's layout gurus then pop things into InDesign (or whatever) to do the actual print-ready layout.

At least Microsoft has given options for their software and not forced a subscription model on people. You can still buy outright the core apps.

Office 2016 for Mac is the most recent (and quite probably the last) standalone version of Office that we can expect for macOS. Details.

CubaMark · Oct 29, 2020

Thread resurrection so I can keep all my dumping on Microsoft Office contained....

I've been working on a chronology of family history, and figured an Excel sheet would make sense.

Off I go, willy-nilly entering names, dates, events, etc., random order, figuring I can just sort by the date column later to get everything lined up.

Nope. Not with Microsoft.

G-D Excel is incapable of handling dates prior to 1900.

There are workarounds, involving VBA scripts, add-ons, blah blah blah.

I just want to do a simple bloody sort. I don't want to have to gain an advanced calculus degree to do so.

Grrrrrrrr......

UPDATE: SoftMaker's PlanMaker (Excel substitute) is likewise afflicted. Sigh.

UPDATE 2: Dammit. Numbers does it too. SEE BELOW

CORRECTION: Numbers will work with pre-1900 dates. For whatever reason, it would not recognize the pre-1900 dates in the spreadsheet imported from Excel, and once re-entered, they now sort properly.

Great! Now I can do what I need to do. But I suspect that if I export to Excel format to share with anyone else in the family, they'll be unable to make any additions to the file and expect it to sort properly in the future.

Rob · Oct 29, 2020

Dates often cause problems in spreadsheets since there are different formats used in different countries. In the US, the default is month,day,year, but in Canada the default is day,month,year. There is a similar problem with number formats. For example, most of Europe uses decimal points to differentiate thousands, whereas we in Canada/US use commas.

My suggestion to avoid future date issues is to separate the date into separate columns for the month day and year. In that way you just enter a plain number in each column. For sorting, the primary sort will be on the year column, the secondary sort on the month column, at the third sort criteria on the day column.

WCraig · Oct 30, 2020

Spreadsheet: use separate columns for year, month and day.

Better: use a genealogy software package.

BTW, did you know that calendars were corrected (for miscounted leap years) starting in 1582 with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in certain countries. Adoption was slow. In the USA in 1752, Wednesday Sep. 2 was followed by Thursday September 14! So the recorded date in different countries could differ for the same day. Wanna blame Excel for that too?

Craig

CubaMark · Oct 30, 2020

Rob said:
Dates often cause problems in spreadsheets since there are different formats used in different countries. In the US, the default is month,day,year, but in Canada the default is day,month,year. There is a similar problem with number formats. For example, most of Europe uses decimal points to differentiate thousands, whereas we in Canada/US use commas.

My suggestion to avoid future date issues is to separate the date into separate columns for the month day and year. In that way you just enter a plain number in each column. For sorting, the primary sort will be on the year column, the secondary sort on the month column, at the third sort criteria on the day column.

Thanks, Rob.

I'm aware of the different uses of yyyy/mm/dd dd/mm/yyyy mm/dd/yyyy and whatever other variation thereof. I prefer dd/mm/year since it makes sense

My next step if I hadn't found resolution would have been separate columns, but as much as I'm happy to employ workarounds when needed, it bugs me that this doesn't *just work*.

CubaMark · Oct 30, 2020

WCraig said:
Spreadsheet: use separate columns for year, month and day.

Better: use a genealogy software package.

BTW, did you know that calendars were corrected (for miscounted leap years) starting in 1582 with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in certain countries. Adoption was slow. In the USA in 1752, Wednesday Sep. 2 was followed by Thursday September 14! So the recorded date in different countries could differ for the same day. Wanna blame Excel for that too?

Craig

My genealogy package of choice is MacFamilyTree

On the matter of the dates - YES! I just came across that bit of historical knowledge. Fascinating that in some places, a ship could have arrived at a port that was still running 11 days behind it's departure from the port of origin, and that some places just skipped a week or so in September. Fascinating!

Office 2011: Really? Really?

CubaMark

CubaMark

Rob

WCraig

CubaMark

CubaMark

Top Contributors this Month

Recommended Communities