Excel time travel

Excel 2010 is sending my data into the future -- one day into the future.


I start with a worksheet containing times.




I then create a Pivot Table from this data and tell Excel to group the dates by Years, Months, and Days.




Excel does what I requested, except that the dates appear to have moved one day into the future. (In this example, my source data contains data for October 13th and 14th only, but the pivot table now shows the dates to be October 14th and 15th.)




When I drill down by double-clicking on values in my pivot table, it again shows the correct dates.





This issue led to me wasting time trying to reconcile data that would not reconcile because I was comparing the wrong dates. At least I didn't make any important decisions based on this off-by-one-day data prior to realizing what was happening.

Not saved

Guy Rosen tweets: An instructive error message from Excel for Mac. How about telling me WHY? 

Every darn time...

Perhaps I'm just weird, but I am of the opinion that a failed database connection should not cause Excel to crash and lose my data.

Can we make troubleshooting any more difficult?

Please tell me, Excel: Did you fail to connect to the server or were my access credentials denied?

Choose less data

But, I only tried to format 2 columns that contain a total of 4 cells with data.

Document not saved

Why not, Excel? Just being ornery?

I told you to save my document. I expect you to save my document. Are you unable to save my document? If so, why not? What can I do to help fix your problem?

Shared?

Submitted by: Manoj Soni.



In "Shared" mode, Microsoft Excel files stored in a shared network location can be edited simultaneously by multiple people from multiple machines. However, this document is both 'Shared' and 'Read Only'. How does a file get into this state?

Hi, my name is Joe

I work at a button factory -- pressing OK on Excel dialogs. ;)

Excel treats numbers like text

Sherry Chupka reports:

I loaded a CSV file into Excel 2007 and noticed some of the cell outlines were missing. 

I copied the value 3045.45 to enter it in a bug report. After that the value was no longer aligned and some of the cell outlines to the right are missing. 

I loaded the file in another editor and found out there are spaces at the end of each record. 

Seems that when I copied the numeric value Excel automatically changed the format of that cell from text to numeric and removed the trailing spaces. There are 3202 rows in this file. Does that mean I have to copy the last value on all the rows? Then I formatted the column using Format Cells. Why doesn’t Format Cells remove the trailing spaces? 

Maybe it should ask if you want to remove spaces. The trailing spaces were only removed from the cells where I copied the numeric portion of the value. I guess Excel doesn’t like spaces after a numeric value.

---

Ben Simo adds:

Numbers entered or imported into Excel are often treated as text.  Changing the display format generally doesn't make any difference in whether data is treated as text or numbers.

This often creates problems. Microsoft is aware of this and addresses it in the help.  The Excel 2003 help states "Occasionally, numbers may be formatted and stored in cells as text, which later can cause problems with calculations or produce confusing sort orders."

So, what can we do about this without manually editing thousands of data cells?  If we perform math on the cells, Excel will change the values to numbers.  The easiest way I've found to handle this is to either add zero to all the cells, or multiply all the values by one.  This can be done by using the Paste Special feature.

By adding 0:

1. Enter a value of 0 into a blank cell.
2. Select the cell with the value 0, and copy the cell to the clipboard
   
3. Select the numeric cells that Excel is treating as text
4. Select Paste Special
5. Select Add
6. Click OK to add 0 to the selected cells.

By multiplying by 1:

1. Enter a value of 1 into a blank cell.
2. Select the cell with the value 1, and copy the cell to the clipboard
   
3. Select the numeric cells that Excel is treating as text
4. Select Paste Special
5. Select Multiply
6. Click OK to add 0 to the selected cells.

Yes, there is a problem here. There is a fix but is isn't very obvious.

File cannot be accessed

Getting this error while saving a new file in Excel 2010. Directory has "[]". 

@Office I am able to create New Excel file in the same directory from Win Explorer (Right click-New-Excel)

@Office Using Word 2010, when I save a file in same directory, I do not get such problem. #Office2010 

- @kamleshrao

What about the ones I don't want to keep?

Excel 2003 has a rather nice feature that will auto-recover files that were open when Excel shuts down in a not-so-nice way. This feature shows a list of recovered documents and allows the user to open or save files.

However, there is no option to remove individual files from the list. The right-click context menu shows a disabled Delete option but no option to remove from the list. (The Delete option is enabled for recovered previously auto-recovered versions of a file.) This non-existent feature may seem to not be a problem until one does like I do and has well over a dozen files open at the time the Excel process was killed or crashed.

I would like to remove items from this long list that I know I don't want and then look at the ones I might want to open and resume my work. Yet, I can't. I can open or save individual files, and/or I can dismiss all of them. I can't dismiss individual files.

So while, this lack of a feature isn't necessarily a bug, it is a problem for me.

The object is not responding

Tweeted by @bp

Yeap, it's still possible to bust Word and Excel with, basically, Copy and Paste. The clincher is this error message (Where's the "Cancel"?!)

Where is the cancel? And click OK to wait?