Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
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Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#2Or perhaps stop using Excel?
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#3I think another question is that why isn't there a viable alternative to excel for this particular use case?
Is there, perhaps, a market for niche spreadsheet applications that serve one particular market?
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#4Why in the world is excel the application of choice? Last time I tried to use it (for much less complicated things than genetics), it choked and became unusable when the filesize exceeded about 6MB. I have yet to encounter a spreadsheet oriented task that isn't better implemented in gnumeric. Maybe we should also shorten all publications so adobe reader can display them without crashing?
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#5Excel’s problem is it destroys the original keystrokes.
Anyone know why? It makes little sense to me.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#6Or perhaps stop using Excel?
Excel is pretty efficient at ad-hoc text processing. You get real time feedback as you change rules and there are lots of handy functions to help you along. Its like a tabbed portable jupyter notebook.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#7To people asking, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?"
The whole world's data ultimately comes from or ends up in an Excel spreadsheet. Sure, we might use other intermediate data storage methods, but in the end it's going to go into some scientist's or some politician's computer, and by golly it's gonna be in Excel. Trying to rally against Excel is like trying to rally against fundamental forces of nature.
This is just an example of that fundamental force winning.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#8Excel isn't the program of choice for most scientists and computational biologists, who typically use R, python, or command line tools. However, we often get data from other scientists or reanalyze data from other groups that can have these errors. It's so frequent of a problem that there are scientific papers about it [1].
[1] https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#9Or perhaps prepending them when typing with either a single quote, apex or double quote (left/center/right align AND consider as Text), like all the rest of Excel users have done for the last 25+ years?
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#10It is just so fun when you have @ as a lead character for fields. You can do DATA-IMPORT from CSV and it is fine but if you just double click load a CSV from explorer it tries to interpret the data as a formula and randomly loses the @
I have not check myself the full list of special characters that cannot be loaded CSV style from Explorer but one should expect consistency with DATA-IMPORT functionality