A fiddly little annoyance has been fixed for anyone using Gooroo SimActive to diagnose their waiting times pressures.

One of Excel’s little “features” is that it often tries to guess what you want, and reformats things even if you didn’t want it to. For example, if you have a date that is correctly formatted ccyy-mm-dd for upload into SimActive, and you open the file in Excel, then Excel thinks “a-ha, this is a date, so you probably want me to reformat it as dd/mm/ccyy”. And it goes right ahead and does it without asking.

This used to mean that SimActive got confused because it wasn’t expecting dates in that format, but no longer, because now it will detect and accept dates in dd/mm/ccyy format. It’s a small issue, and it wasn’t hard to work around in Excel, but it was a little bit fiddly and so we’ve fixed it.

So you don’t need to force Excel to deliver ccyy-mm-dd formats any more; the default dd/mm/ccyy is just fine (and ccyy-mm-dd and ccyymmdd are both fine too).