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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

#361

Post by lioeters »

eitland wrote: post #331
brummm wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany does. Probably the majority of Europe too

I think you misread: most of mainland Europe including Germany use dd.mm.yyyy or something else that is reasonable sane even if it isn't sortable like yyyy-mm-dd. Or am I wrong on this? Norway at least use mm.dd.yyyy and never mm/dd or mm.dd.yyyy

> The format dd.mm.yyyy using dots is the traditional German date format.

> Since 1996-05-01, the international format yyyy-mm-dd has become the official standard date format

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

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

#362

Post by snowwrestler »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #328
snowwrestler wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most scientists are not great at math either. Again: these are tools that are means to an end. They only need to work well enough to get the researcher to that end. A lot of what are considered essential practices by expert programmers are conventions centered around long-term productivity in programming. You can get a right answer out of a computer without following those conventions. Lots of people did back in the…

Your point is maybe a little obtuse to me, because it sounds like you are arguing for "computers are tools that should be learned, but really no one does and who can blame them, they just want to science" and simultaneously arguing, "tools aren't science, and science can be done without them". I feel like the later is obvious: of course the tools aren't science, but if you want to do real work and real science, your…

> Scientists can't reach a meaningful conclusion without proper use of tools.

I'm just trying to make the point that "proper" is subjective. Software developers evaluate the quality of code according to how well it adheres to well-established coding practices, but those practices were established to address long-term issues like maintainability and security, not whether the software produces the right answer.

You can get the right answer out of software even if the code is ugly and hacky, and for a lot of scientific research, the answer is all that matters.

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

#363

Post by oneplane »

gamblor956 wrote: post #262
oneplane wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually having a lot of scenarios where Excel is banned except for some managers, C-level and board type stuff. If you produce, touch or directly act on data, Excel is no longer allowed. On the other levels the people that still use it (because they think they have the skill - which they often don't) can't do meaningful direct-action on those files anyway so that solves part of the problem of acting on bad data…

The difference is that the people that don't hate it now have an empowered skillset that they didn't have before. Not knowing how to use the primary tool in your field because you only know how to use a web-based spreadsheet with 1/100th the functionality is not an "empowered skillset." It's a cruel trick to play on employees, who will have difficulty finding further jobs in that field because they don't have a basic…

I was talking about Apache Spark via Databricks. ~220 of the people that were attached to Excel and PowerBI switched over for their calculations and data processing, 3 remained. One was let go, one didn't actually use Excel to write data, only to see it and search it, and the third wasn't able to learn the replacement so they got to keep Excel.

It's not a cruel trick and even if it was: web-based spreadsheets might not have the same functionality, but the people that were using the desktop-based spreadsheets weren't doing much more than basic computation on fields and search/replace. That works fine on the web.

It's not like we took away their toys and gave them dirt instead. We just made everyone take the startup course to get them acquainted and if that went well we would decide our next steps. It went well, and the next steps became removing Excel from the standard workflows.

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

#364

Post by DMLoeffe »

dekhn wrote: post #358

In grad school I studied a gene which at the time was called Oct1 ("octamer binding protein 1"). My main problem was literature searches, which often found "OCT-1" (organic cation transporter-1). Genomic naming is a total mess, I found it easier to just mentally compute the md5sum of a name, then memorize the first few digits (only need about 8-10 hex digits).

> just mentally compute the md5sum of a name

What are you taking about lol

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

#365

Post by jandrese »

LatteLazy wrote: post #163
nikk1 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are dozens of auto-formatting "features" that piss me off each and every day across all of Microsoft's products.

You turn them off,forget about it, and then auto-update turns them all back on for you!

Or you're on a different machine that doesn't have it and you have to decide if digging through the menus to turn them off is worse than manually undoing all of the "fixes" for your message.

Have you ever posted a code snippit into a default install of Outlook?

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

#366

Post by pintxo »

FrojoS wrote: post #349
pintxo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Germany this converts to the first of Feb, and this way of entering dates is just so convenient, as you can type the whole date just using the keys from the num block. We do actually support this format in our app for date entry, simply because it's so convenient.

The usual way to write the date Feb 1st in Germany (and I think anywhere but the US) is 01.02 or 1.2. but not 01/02 And the . is part of the num block as well. Also, data being interpreted different based on region/language settings is a sure way to end up with bugs, so I think its a terrible thing that Excel does this.

a) You write "1/2" and Excel replaces it with "01. Feb" by default if using de-DE as Locale (just checked it) [This auto replacement is also the basis of the linked article]

b) There is no "." on the num-pad for German keyboard layouts, they have a "," the German decimal separator.

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

#367

Post by foresto »

Somewhat tangential:

If you use software in American English but dislike American date and time formats, you might see if your OS respects the en_DK locale setting. It works on most recent linux systems I've tried.

$ LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 date '+%x %X'

08/06/2020 01:00:00 PM

$ LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8 date '+%x %X'

2020-08-06 13:00:00

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

#368

Post by TeMPOraL »

FrojoS wrote: post #349
pintxo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Germany this converts to the first of Feb, and this way of entering dates is just so convenient, as you can type the whole date just using the keys from the num block. We do actually support this format in our app for date entry, simply because it's so convenient.

The usual way to write the date Feb 1st in Germany (and I think anywhere but the US) is 01.02 or 1.2. but not 01/02 And the . is part of the num block as well. Also, data being interpreted different based on region/language settings is a sure way to end up with bugs, so I think its a terrible thing that Excel does this.

I'd say that in general, we need to get rid of locales in computing. They're an unending source of bugs and annoyances.

It's not "techies know best" whining. We've been increasingly computerizing the economy for the past 50+ years; it's past time for societies to adapt to that reality, instead of wasting time and money on dealing with dozens of date formats, number separators, currency notations, etc.

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

#369

Post by jandrese »

wombatpm wrote: post #360
airstrike wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just type '01/02 or ="01/02" and get on with your life

Better learn to properly import data via csv. If you just double click you get the excel helpfulness. If you choose open you can specify the column formats. I load dates and zip codes as text and then format the columns correctly AFTER everything loads. VBA macros are wonderful if you have the same format over and over again. If I has a nickle for everytime excel munged a date or stripped a leading zero from a zip co…

I've always been surprised at how bad Excel is at importing CSV files. The solution feels like it was hacked together by an intern over the weekend even though this is an incredibly common use case.

I had to build a very basic CSV->XLS tool once because the built-in CSV import kept screwing up. Admittedly the CSV files were slightly mis-formatted in places, but that wasn't the only headache with the import.

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

#370

Post by pintxo »

eitland wrote: post #331
brummm wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany does. Probably the majority of Europe too

I think you misread: most of mainland Europe including Germany use dd.mm.yyyy or something else that is reasonable sane even if it isn't sortable like yyyy-mm-dd. Or am I wrong on this? Norway at least use mm.dd.yyyy and never mm/dd or mm.dd.yyyy

Afaik Norway also uses the sane format: DD.MM.YYYY

See parent source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

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