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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

#421

Post by brandonmenc »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #251
throwaway936482 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excels usability isn't bad though. Which is why everyone uses it. It falls down in this (and lots of other cases) but if you want to see what good usability looks like, look at what people use.

Everyone uses Excel because it's a tool everybody learned at University or even highschool, nothing more, it's not because it's good at all. It's a terrible app but Microsoft managed to shove it everywhere in education. Same for Words. Unfortunately Libre Office and co tried to reproduce the terrible UX of both software, while coming up with inferior functionalities because they had to try to maximise compatibility w…

> Everyone uses Excel because it's a tool everybody learned at University or even highschool, nothing more

My anecdote is the exact opposite.

I was recently introduced to using Excel and actually writing some VBA inside of it when I helped a non-programmer with a complicated data processing task on a sheet they were populating from a database.

This was the first time I really used Excel, even though I've had continuous access to it since Windows 3.0.

Aside from some small annoyances, it was a generally pleasant experience. I also can't think of any tool that comes remotely close to the power and flexibility of Excel, particularly for people who are not programmers.

I kind of got hooked on it, and now I frequently use it for little data processing tasks that I used to do in a REPL - and the bonus is I can share those with people who are not programmers.

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

#422

Post by knorker »

javier123454321 wrote: post #241
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...)

Honestly though, dates make more sense being month first, that way if you are trying to discover which one comes first, 10th of february or 10th of january, you only have to go to the first parameter in format 01/10 vs 02/10 instead of 10/01, 10/02. Logically, the most broad data item should go first.

When does it matter to have month and day, but not year? Like the one time is for birthdays. The web is full of articles exactly dated with old day and month, neglecting year.

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

#423

Post by asdff »

mcv wrote: post #162

> "Why, exactly, in a fight between Microsoft and the entire genetics community, was it the scientists who had to back down?" Back down? Or pick a better tool. If Excel proves to be an unreliable tool for your job, use a better one. Alternatives exist, ranging from Google Docs, and LibreOffice, to simpler light-weight spreadsheets. Or possibly more specialist tools. Why does everything always have to be put in Excel…

The vast majority of people who use tabular data a lot in biology are already just using python or R primarily, and most do this work on a cluster. This article is what happens when you send your .csv to a PI who hasn't bothered to brush up on any computer literacy after somehow mastering punch card programming, or the undergrad whose breadth of understanding beyond the web browser starts with MS office and ends with g suite.

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

#424

Post by out_of_protocol »

sneak wrote: post #311
reportgunner wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS is the only proper format. It is sorted from the greatest unit (year) to the smallest unit (second). If you treat them as text and sort alphabetically they still get sorted from oldest to newest. Other formats don't sort properly. writing dd.mm.yyyy is like writing time ss:mm:hh writing mm/dd/yyyy is like writing time mm/ss/hh If I really have to put YYYY at the end of the date I use the 'dd-…

I suggest a literal T instead of a space, and don’t forget the timezone offset (or a literal Z). ISO 8601 is great.

Well it is but the T is ugly :/

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

#425

Post by brohee »

brandonmenc wrote: post #421
throw_m239339 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone uses Excel because it's a tool everybody learned at University or even highschool, nothing more, it's not because it's good at all. It's a terrible app but Microsoft managed to shove it everywhere in education. Same for Words. Unfortunately Libre Office and co tried to reproduce the terrible UX of both software, while coming up with inferior functionalities because they had to try to maximise compatibility w…

> Everyone uses Excel because it's a tool everybody learned at University or even highschool, nothing more My anecdote is the exact opposite. I was recently introduced to using Excel and actually writing some VBA inside of it when I helped a non-programmer with a complicated data processing task on a sheet they were populating from a database. This was the first time I really used Excel, even though I've had continuo…

You may enjoy "Pure Functional Programming in Excel" by Felienne Hermans presented at GOTO 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw

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

#426

Post by trianglem »

gmfawcett wrote: post #409
LatteLazy wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2020-08-06 I've just switched to 20200806. Let it be an int and be done with it.

A beautiful property of using ints to represent dates is that you can manipulate them using simple arithmetic. For example, if you want to refer to noon-time on 20200806, you can simply divide the day in two and write it as 10100403. An elegant, DRY solution to a perennial problem.

I don’t get this? What does 10100403 mean?

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

#427

Post by CarbyAu »

nikk1 wrote: post #161
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...)

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

My pet hate:

- use the mouse to select precisely the part of the word/URL/string you want for Ctrl-C purposes

- it autocorrects your selection to the whole word including a CrLf if it is nearby.

Aaargh!

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

#428

Post by ezekiel68 »

I have heard of life imitating art -- but I must say I find it a little eyeroll-worthy to contemplate that otherwise bright grad students and other researchers were unable to push through the struggle to understand and adapt to the quirks of MS Excel that many of the rest of us (in other fields) have needed to. I would have sooner expected Microsof to have added a "gene name" cell formatter option than for this to have occurred.

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

#429

Post by erAck »

mcv wrote: post #390
erAck wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice Calc: "SEPT-2" is a date, "SEPT2" is not.

Do they change the data or only the representation? Several people here argued that LibreOffice preserved the original data, which would be a pretty fundamental difference in this context.

SEPT-2 is changed to date (that is how all major spreadsheet software works if an input is accepted as date), SEPT2 is kept as text as entered.

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

#430

Post by gmfawcett »

trianglem wrote: post #426
gmfawcett wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A beautiful property of using ints to represent dates is that you can manipulate them using simple arithmetic. For example, if you want to refer to noon-time on 20200806, you can simply divide the day in two and write it as 10100403. An elegant, DRY solution to a perennial problem.

I don’t get this? What does 10100403 mean?

The poster is gently teasing the idea that integers like 20200806 are a reasonable way to to represent dates. Dividing 20200806 by 2, we get 10100403, representing the half-way point of the day (noon-time). Of course it's nonsense.
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