The Reddit post from u/learningNlurking cuts straight to a frustration that has dogged spreadsheet users for years, and our opinion is plain: a tool that guesses your date format is a tool that wastes your time. The default display of "2-Mar" instead of the short date you have explicitly set in your system preferences is not a feature, it is a failure of design that prioritizes the software's convenience over the user's intent.
What this means in practical terms is that every time you open a new workbook, you are forced to fight a default that assumes you want a format no one asked for. The poster's question, "who is the 2-Mar format useful for?", deserves a real answer. It may have originated in legacy systems where space was tight and abbreviations saved characters, or in regional localization choices that never got revisited. But the audience for that format is not the modern user who has already told their operating system exactly how dates should appear. When a spreadsheet ignores that instruction, it breaks trust. You checked your settings. You did the right thing. The tool should honor that.
The deeper issue here is about control. Traditional spreadsheets treat date formatting as a suggestion rather than a command, and that mindset carries over into other areas: cell references that shift unpredictably, conditional formatting rules that vanish when you sort, pivot tables that assume you want summaries you never requested. Each small friction adds up to a workflow where the user spends more time correcting defaults than doing actual work. A progressive tool does not guess. It listens to the system settings you already configured, and it lets you set your own defaults once, not every single time you type a date.
The solution is not a workaround involving custom format strings or a macro that resets cells on open. The solution is a different philosophy: the spreadsheet should adapt to you, not the other way around. If your operating system says "dd/mm/yyyy," the cell should show "dd/mm/yyyy." If you prefer "yyyy-mm-dd" for database exports, that should be a one-click preference, not a hunt through menus. This is not a radical ask. It is the baseline expectation for any tool that claims to handle data. The moment a spreadsheet stops guessing and starts obeying, it becomes a partner in your work rather than an obstacle. That is the future we should demand.