[R] Excel

[Moshe Olshansky]

This is very consistent with Microsoft's philosophy:
they know better than you what you want to do.

--- David Scott <d.scott at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:

> 
> A common process when data is obtained in an Excel
> spreadsheet is to save 
> the spreadsheet as a .csv file then read it into R.
> Experienced users 
> might have learned to be wary of dates (as I have)
> but possibly have not 
> experienced what just happened to me. I thought I
> might just share it with 
> r-help as a cautionary tale.
> 
> I received an Excel file giving patient details.
> Each patient had an ID 
> code in the form of three letters followed by four
> digits. (Actually a New 
> Zealand National Health Identification.) I saved the
> .xls file as .csv. 
> Then I opened up the .csv (with Excel) to look at
> it. In the column of ID 
> codes I saw: Aug-99. Clicking on that entry it
> showed 1/08/2699.
> 
> In a column of character data, Excel had interpreted
> AUG2699 as a date.
> 
> The .csv did not actually have a date in that cell,
> but if I had saved the 
> .csv file it would have.
> 
> David Scott
> 
>
_________________________________________________________________
> David Scott	Department of Statistics, Tamaki Campus
>  		The University of Auckland, PB 92019
>  		Auckland 1142,    NEW ZEALAND
> Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86830		Fax: +64 9 373 7000
> Email:	d.scott at auckland.ac.nz
> 
> Graduate Officer, Department of Statistics
> Director of Consulting, Department of Statistics
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained,
> reproducible code.
>