Or perhaps stop using Excel?
What’s the alternative?
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
#12Human language is more flexible than computer language. We send a few emails, agree on a new word, bingo bango problem solved. Easier than everyone learning a new computer program, easier than teaching everyone how to avoid the errors in Excel, just send a memo to all involved, and those who miss the memo will slowly catch on anyway. MARCH1 -> MARCHF1 seems like a good change and will not cause any confusion.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#13Excel 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...
I had to use Excel for 100% of my publications and posters in medical services research. Either the data is in Excel or Excel is a tidy place to put data dictionaries. While I'd love to use only R, most of my collaborators wouldn't be able to use it, it's niche, whereas Excel is the lingua franca of data analysis.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#14I 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?
I’ve been wishing for something like this lately in the apple ecosystem: sort of a “plain text” tabular editor that can handle large data sets. Numbers feels like it’s designed for presentations more than data crunching, and Excel (or at least the price of excel) would be overkill for my needs (which largely consists of data cleanup, spot-checking, and quick calculations). I’d happily pay for an IA-Writerish spreadsheet app.
Edit: or maybe Sublime Text is more what I mean. In any case I’m hoping someone will pop in and say, “well why aren’t you Snappets!?” and then I’ll go buy a copy of Snappets.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#15Or 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?
You don't understand the problem. Read the article.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#16In a previous version of MS Excel, after opening a CSV file, Excel would silently write the 'interpreted' version to disk. So much trouble, simply from previewing a CSV.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#17To 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 ag…
True in every sense.
We shifted from google sheets to O365, there's just no way to go around excel. Its efficient and every one from a novice to expert can find their way around it.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#18Or perhaps stop using Excel?
Excel is amazing at what it does.
I had a Manager that spent an entire week compiling a report on how much times people spent on tasks.
He was very proud as he was showing me this report. I asked him why he didn’t use a pivot table.
While he was asking what that was, I spent two minutes on the same data that he had and reproduced his report. I had a friend and patron for life after that. I was involved in many major decisions for a fortune 50. All because I could work excel.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#19Excel’s problem is it destroys the original keystrokes. Anyone know why? It makes little sense to me.
Because usability is measured by the naive expectations of the least sophisticated users.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#20Why 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?
Maybe you should ditch your Pentium 1 and buy a newer computer?