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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

#391

Post by loktarogar »

T-hawk wrote: post #384
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...)

Excel is stuck. It can't change this behavior if it cares about backwards compatibility. There are uncountably many recorded macros and all sorts of scripts and data tools everywhere, that implicitly and inadvertently depend on behavior like this. Like Javascript's warts, you have to declare these as features and live with them. Of course Microsoft has thought about this, it's silly to think they never have and we're…

imagine if they worked with the industry to build in a set of relatively agreed upon defaults, like turning autoformat off for dates that matched a critera. then geneticists could activate the geneticist profile and excel works as they'd expect. if they encountered a file that broke, they could turn that profile off.

that's a fairly sophisticated solution, but it's just one of many potential approaches to fixing the problem.

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

#392

Post by thaumasiotes »

bad_user wrote: post #152
airstrike wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reasoning is people type in "01/02" to actually mean Jan 2nd more often than they import CSVs into Excel. So Microsoft favored one over the other I don't see a problem with that, as it's not undefined behavior – you know exactly how Excel will treat those values

"01/02" does not translate to Jan 2nd in most of the world, because DMY is much more popular than MDY. Excel is biased for US users.

> "01/02" does not translate to Jan 2nd in most of the world, because DMY is much more popular than MDY.

This doesn't follow. There's no year in 01/02. MD is more popular than DM.

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

#393

Post by conductr »

taejo wrote: post #265
conductr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also you can single quote ‘MARCH1 to keep it as string. This is safer as when you share the file you don’t know if the next person has the same settings change you described. Either way, it’s only 27 genes they had to rename. Seems like a good choice on their part to just rename them. Hopefully they’re doing this check during the naming stage for new genes.

Now save that file as CSV (maybe because you want to process it with some non-Excel tool) and re-open it. Mar-1.

Touché. I do everything in Excel file formats but I’m also not a scientist.

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

#394

Post by rolph »

vikramkr wrote: post #387
rolph wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no these are not meaningless names, there is undue confusication in the case of the more contemporary names such as [Sonichedgehog] these are not meaningless lables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog mentioned eslewhere in this thread is a nomenclature that allows one to easily find notes referring to the gene from your research library. It was a new cadre of young upcoming scientists that decided to break…

They're tags and you end up with multiple names for the same gene. They might as well be replaced with an arbitrary string of numbers- those are equally easy to do a quick Google scholar or pubmed search with. You don't lose anything of value by changing the name. In chemistry amd organic chemistry, the proper IUPAC name of the compound also tells you its structure. It tells you what the compound is in a real physica…

this does not negate the fact that these tags or lables actually do have meaning they are not arbitrarily made up.

if you do not have any understanding of rust and you read the source code it seems like meaningless tags but if you understand the idea of syntax you can see there is some underlying principle to the combinations of characters.

being unfamiliar with the scheme doesnt make it meaningless hash. the failure is not representation it is interpretation.

if we want to talk about absolutes the universal way to identify a gene is with its locus or loci depending on the nature of the gene, before we get there we use "tags" lables indexes to allow quick access to a particular character in a local store of data.

the whole thing about revising the standards of a genes identifying name is about getting the greatest benefit quickly with the least effort so we can get back to science and away from blaming the tools for the lack of craftsmanship.

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

#395

Post by eitland »

pintxo wrote: post #370
eitland wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Edit: of course. To late to edit but if you read my post, but that was what I meant.

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

#396

Post by dekhn »

aqme28 wrote: post #374
DMLoeffe wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just mentally compute the md5sum of a name What are you taking about lol

> mentally compute I think he means "remember"

md5 is easy- you only have to remember a few hundred constants (they can also be computed on the fly) and do basic bit operations on a small output (16 bytes).

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

#397

Post by wombatpm »

ubermonkey wrote: post #134
leecarraher wrote: post #24

Final Jeopardy : Trebeck: You know what, how about you just write down a number, any number at all. Could be a 1 or a 2, perhaps 3... and excel you answered; A smiley face emoji, simply stunning. Excel is no longer motivated by the original intention of a spreadsheet, and now caters to the lowest common denominator, a piece of graph paper. As such MS has shifted focus from doing calculation to text and graphics layou…

MSFT did the same thing with Project when they introduced something called "Manually Scheduled Tasks." Project is fundamentally a critical path scheduling tool, or at least was. Task A must finish before Task B, which must complete before Task C. If A is delayed, then that delay pushes B and C out, too. This is what it's FOR, more or less. Manually scheduled tasks don't move. They're set with whatever dates you give…

Project scheduling on works badly if you have resources 100% dedicated to a project. Trying to acurately forcast with partial resource is an exercise in madness.

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

#398

Post by hermitcrab »

Excel is an amazing tool. But it also has some significant shortcomings:

* A well known tendency to mangle date and gene data under the guide of being 'helpful'. * Easy to making mistakes when cutting and pasting cells. * Difficult to see what is going on in a spreadsheet. * Poor handling of CSV files.

Some of these shortcoming are inherent to spreadsheets. Others are specific to Excel, but hard to overcome due to the weight of backward compatibility.

I have written a product for transforming and analysing tabular data (https://www.easydatatransform.com) that tries to overcome these issues:

* Doesn't change your input data file. * Doesn't re-interpret your data, unless you ask it to. * See changes as a visual data flow. * Operations happen on a whole table or column. * Good handling of CSV files.

Also it doesn't try to do everything Excel does.

It is a fairly new tool. Would appreciate some feedback.

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

#399

Post by komali2 »

LatteLazy wrote: post #329
komali2 wrote: post #247

In excel, can you set the a column to not format to dates? I think you can do that in google docs for example. Why don't they do that?

It's actually worse. If you expressly set the format of a column to text, then put 01/01 in it, you still get Jan-01 and a field value of 46000ish.

That's horrible UX - why on earth is it that way?

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

#400

Post by mjevans »

loktarogar wrote: post #391
T-hawk wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is stuck. It can't change this behavior if it cares about backwards compatibility. There are uncountably many recorded macros and all sorts of scripts and data tools everywhere, that implicitly and inadvertently depend on behavior like this. Like Javascript's warts, you have to declare these as features and live with them. Of course Microsoft has thought about this, it's silly to think they never have and we're…

imagine if they worked with the industry to build in a set of relatively agreed upon defaults, like turning autoformat off for dates that matched a critera. then geneticists could activate the geneticist profile and excel works as they'd expect. if they encountered a file that broke, they could turn that profile off. that's a fairly sophisticated solution, but it's just one of many potential approaches to fixing the…

It would be way less effort to have the same exact program under a completely new name.

MS Excel

MS (names are harder than I thought / remembered) Matrix

In the back-end they'd use the same sanity and share 99% of the code, but Excel would add in the cruft / warts compatibility quirks.

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