Mastodawn

Is there a spreadsheet that doesn't mess with the data I enter?

https://lemmy.world/post/44205006

Is there a spreadsheet that doesn't mess with the data I enter? - Lemmy.World

No shaving off leading zeroes, no assuming I want a formula unless I explicitly prepend the cell with an = (or whatever the syntax is). If I want a string that starts with a hyphen, it’s just a string that starts with a hyphen. If I open a CSV or TSV file and save a copy without doing anything to it, it should be identical to the original down to hashing the same. But I’d also like the nice auto-filtering capabilities that excel has, where there’s a dropdown on each column for sorting and searching. Does such a program exist?

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Onomatopoeia Mar 13

AFAIK, when you save to CSV with Excel it doesn’t add anything.

But you won’t have a Table either, as that requires saving yonan Excel format.

As for the rest just format your columns as “text” in Excel.

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deegeese Mar 13

You’re describing a tabular data editor, not a spreadsheet which is designed for calculation.

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early_riser Mar 13

Do you have any tabular data editors to recommend?

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deegeese Mar 13

I’d start by putting the data in JSON because TSV/CSV is brittle and old.

There are many tools for tabular JSON.

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jbrains Mar 14

Moderncsv or visidata don’t do everything you want, but might merit looks.

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Tiresia Mar 13

I was going to complain that clearly “spreadsheet” derives from paper-based tabular data editors. But apparently that term was only used consistently after 1906, while digital spreadsheets that aided calculation were conceived of in 1961. Meaning that it has meant a digital calculation aid for longer (65 years) than it only meant a tabular data editor (55 years).

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