Friday, July 22, 2005

Stupid Software

Excel doesn't understand dates before 1900 (on Mac, on Windows it's 1904). Cut and paste September 21, 1874 into a cell, format it as a date and all looks fine. Try to refer to that cell in a formula and you get a cryptic error. Ok, the OS natively uses dates starting from those times, you have to do some extra work to handle old dates, and dealing with date math involving leap years and the conversion to the gregorian calendar(which happened in 1752 in America but as early as 1582 in parts of Europe) isn't easy. But really has no one in Microsoft ever dealt with history or genealogy? You can find free plugins to add extended date functions but really why should you have to?

Spotlight is OS X's new search technology and it's pretty good. At first I didn't use it much and now I'm using it more. While it normally searches inside files I saw a hint that said if you surround your query with quotes it will only search filenames which is useful to narrow down a search. I had a file called "WikiBookConf.txt", if I searched for "Wiki" (with quotes) I didn't get that file in the results. It turns out at least for filename searches (and maybe others) Spotliight only searches whole words, not parts of words. How dumb is that? Yeah I'm now adapting my naming conventions but it would have been nice if any of the spotlight documentation indicated this is how it worked.

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