If the genomics community is really so big, they should just make their own file format (.gcvs or something) and make an Excel plugin that treats it as literal text cells.
Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
281–290 of 518 posts
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yeah, I'm totally aware. My day job is designing and building software to construct/maintain exactly those pipelines. What I'm saying (which is not news to you) is that clearly Excel is excelling along some dimension that people really care about. Even if it is lacking along other dimensions, the goal ought to be figuring out what makes Excel so good, then figuring out how to reconcile that with the needs of e.g.…
Excel excells at being already installed on most computers. That's it.
Huh.
Most computers also have a built in calculator app, but I have never heard of those being difficult to pull from the hands of users, even when replacing it with purpose built software that costs tens of millions of dollars per year.
But what do I know :)
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all There is tremendous competition in the spreadsheet business, and anyone is free to use Julia, R, whatever they like.
But they don't, and that's a problem. It's an education problem: everybody automatically defaults to Excel, even when it's not the proper tool. People need to learn about better tools.
You can't force people to use a different tool that they don't want to use. They [(computational) biologists] know other tools pretty well, they don't want to use them. If you want to help, work on better tools for them, based on their needs. Regulation is about the worst thing you could've thought of. If you said this to my gf's research group, they would yell at you, Excel is a loved piece of software among them, and other spreadsheet applications are not even close. They don't want to have a dozen different tools that they have to switch between fifty times an hour, converting data in the meantime, they want to know one or two very well and have the data all there. Excel is a data swiss army knife, which is exactly what they need, it has some warts but forcing them off Excel really is not the solution.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (otr they know it's bs). Well, that's a new acronym for me. I wonder where it came from. Apparently it's "on the real". Sounds like AAVE?
off-the-record (not written, not cited, but available in personal discussions).
Oh, I thought "on the real" fit the context better, meaning they knew in their heart of hearts it was bullshit, but "off the record" is about the same.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we didn't accept them as they are. We looked at two options, change excel or change gene names, and picked the one most likely to solve the problem. Gene names mean nothing anyway. We're going from random letters that mean nothing to humans and computers to still random letters that mean nothing but at least don't get confused for dates.
there was a time when a gene was named to facilitate search through a bookshelf full of laboratory notes. you could look at a genes lable and know exactly where to find reference to the gene, the lable would indicate the stack number the shelf, the section the volume the page[s] and paragraph....lables such as Sonichedgehog dont do that anymore.
I've been in the room when deciding what to call a gene that the lab had just characterized/identified as interesting for the publication they were working on, and let's just say that making it easy to catalog and find the gene wasn't really on their mind. They'd actually been using a deliberately obfuscated name in conferences to prevent people from scooping their work on the gene before, which is pretty common.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#286It'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...)
Just type '01/02 or ="01/02" and get on with your life
Is that January 2, February 1, January 2002, or January 1902?
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This shit could be avoided if they had a "scientific mode" to not be smart with your data, and be the default mode for any file in CSV/TSV mode. There's a whole lot of business use of CSV/TSV with Excel that benefits from the existing defaults. Heck, I've seen federal government websites distributing code lists that are actually in CSV format with .XLS extensions and that are expected to use the default “smart” con…
Then we are doomed to the lowest denominator. The bad actor here is the one that expects some software to magically change your data, and he should expect an error or at least a warning or asking for confirmation. To good actor is people who carefully care and curate their data, just to be corrupted silently by the program. Lets say then, keep the default but add at least some sort of "respect my data as it is, becau…
> Lets say then, keep the default but add at least some sort of "respect my data as it is, because this is a CSV with CSV extension" mode.
CSV doesn't have really data types (or even a hard and fast standard), so that doesn't really work. OTOH, Excel lets you specify data handling by column when importing from untyped text-based formats like CSV, which you should probably do if you care.
Or you should write up a standard for a CSV-like format with explicit semantics around data types (it could even be CSV-compatible so that you get no worse results than normal CSV handling if using software that is aware of CSV but not the new format) and start using it where those defined semantics are useful, and try to get Microsoft to add specific support to Excel for it.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#288To 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…
OK then. Use Excel. But at least know the basics of Excel. Such as simply right clicking the column header and picking a different format so that it will stop auto-interpreting the input.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#289Earlier 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.
Ah yes. Without acute regulatory action, Lotus 1-2-3 would have never been defeated, the PalmPilot would have reigned supreme as a smartphone device to this day, and Starbucks would have taken over all coffee production.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It was quite literally making random combinations of various trigonometric functions, absolute value, logarithms, polynomials, exponents, etc. into equations that were like a whole page long and just wiggling them around. Technically, we call that a "neural network". Or "AI".
It reminds me more of a genetic algorithm
Everytime I think I'm getting somewhere with a GA I eventually realise I've just created a guided monte carlo simulation.