Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 518 posts

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#121

Post by epistasis »

unnouinceput wrote: post #28

Quote: "There’s no easy fix, either. Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting..." What kind of loopy Excel variant the article's author is using? It's right there in settings, you can easy stop auto-formatting. Yes, default installation has it on, but it can be turned off.

I do not believe it can be turned off, or at least I've never encountered a version where it could be turned off by toggling options.

Create a simple CSV file like

    Gene,value
    SEPT1,-7
Open it in Excel, and watch SEPT1 be silently converted to 1-Sep, with no way to return.

Exce is truly worse than most people can imagine.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#122

Post by sixdimensional »

owl57 wrote: post #119
LatteLazy wrote: post #26

It's honestly amazing that Excel hasn't fixed this issue. It's pisses off an enormous number of users especially in basically any non-US country (even if 01/02 is a date, it isn't the second of January in most of the world...)

I don't even know why anyone still uses this notation in today's connected world. 2020-08-06 is ideal. Russian standard (06.08.2020) is uglier (digits are not sorted by significance) but still unambiguous. But that slash horror? Why would anyone continue inflicting this on themselves and their peers!?

ISO8601

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#123

Post by yardstick »

dr_orpheus wrote: post #69
azalemeth wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " To people calling, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?"" I respectfully disagree with this. Excel is fundamentally not suited to analysing *omics data. It's often the default program affiliated with a .csv filetype on people's computers, but trying to get an entire field of scientific research to rewrite itself based on its glorified bugs is...wrong, in my opinion. If…

Having Excel be the default for .csv files has caused me problems in the past as well with Excel automatically changing data when you open it. The unfortunate thing I have come across multiple times is a csv file that has some values with a lot of significant figures, i.e. 123456789876, 987654321234 After opening in Excel it will convert these to: 1.23E+11, 9.87E+11 Then resaving the file (as a csv) will store the va…

Same here, but with IMEI numbers. Excel silently truncates them, it’s frustrating. Why can’t the auto format detect and just store them in text format?

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#124

Post by spuz »

owl57 wrote: post #119
LatteLazy wrote: post #26

It's honestly amazing that Excel hasn't fixed this issue. It's pisses off an enormous number of users especially in basically any non-US country (even if 01/02 is a date, it isn't the second of January in most of the world...)

I don't even know why anyone still uses this notation in today's connected world. 2020-08-06 is ideal. Russian standard (06.08.2020) is uglier (digits are not sorted by significance) but still unambiguous. But that slash horror? Why would anyone continue inflicting this on themselves and their peers!?

How is "06.08.2020" unambiguous?

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#125

Post by takluyver »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #109
takluyver wrote: post #78

Programmers love to complain about Excel, but we happily use YAML, which has essentially the same footgun: certain strings (like 'on') need quoting if you don't want it to interpret them as something else.

YAML offers a simple solution though: just quote all one-word text and, more importantly, quote all text you don't manually write into the YAML file. Also, the main problem is that excel changes your input instead of just misinterpreting it. The difference being, the original will be gone.

You could also start every Excel cell with ' . But it's really convenient not to quote stuff, so that's what everyone does, both in Excel and in YAML.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#126

Post by bryanrasmussen »

gameswithgo wrote: post #103
acidburnNSA wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a strong feeling that, if people really put an effort into reading and replicating more papers, we would find that a lot of what's being published is simply meaningless. In grad school I had a subletting roommate for a while who was writing code to match some experimental data with a model. He showed me his model. It was quite literally making random combinations of various trigonometric functions, absolute va…

isn’t the saying, 80% of everything is garbage?

Sturgeon's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law "ninety percent of everything is crap."

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#127

Post by take_a_breath »

ppod wrote: post #64
jordigh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is not fundamentally suited, but it's fundamentally used. I wish you luck, but I long ago declared defeat against Excel. I can't prevent everyone from using it. I have come to accept that whatever Excel does is what I have to live with, because someone, somewhere out there hasn't heard the anti-Excel gospel yet.

Quantitative social science (which maybe a lot of comp bio people might regard as a "softer" science) has really made huge strides in moving this kind of analysis to R. Of course one person can't change it, but those with high status in the field can make a difference by leading the way and setting standards.

At some point, you generate a dataframe with the data in R, save it as a csv, email it to someone, and they open it in.....Excel.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#129

Post by arthurcolle »

ianai wrote: post #84
jordigh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is not fundamentally suited, but it's fundamentally used. I wish you luck, but I long ago declared defeat against Excel. I can't prevent everyone from using it. I have come to accept that whatever Excel does is what I have to live with, because someone, somewhere out there hasn't heard the anti-Excel gospel yet.

This is the exact sort of thing that indicates market-power being concentrated to a point requiring severe, acute regulatory action.

Not at all

There is tremendous competition in the spreadsheet business, and anyone is free to use Julia, R, whatever they like.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#130

Post by takluyver »

fabian2k wrote: post #86
takluyver wrote: post #78

Programmers love to complain about Excel, but we happily use YAML, which has essentially the same footgun: certain strings (like 'on') need quoting if you don't want it to interpret them as something else.

We programmers also complain a lot about YAML, though maybe not enough and not as much as about Excel. But some YAML footguns like the country code for Norway being interpreted as a boolean are reasonably famous, and I think widely regarded as a bad idea.

To be fair, there are few things programmers don't complain about. But YAML still seems to be very popular as a configuration format for new tools, e.g. CI services.
Post reply on HN