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

451–460 of 518 posts

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

#451

Post by BbzzbB »

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…

You are bringing me back nightmares, how I wish I was Python-litterate during my previous employment.

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

#452

Post by BbzzbB »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #448
BbzzbB wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"too complicated for simple tasks" How can Excel possibly be too complicated for simple tasks? It is pretty much as straightforward as it goes when it comes to grid-file viewing and editing. You can show it to anyone from a high-schooler to a 60 year old (with minimal experience on computers) colleagues and they will figure it out rather easily, good luck teaching Python/Pandas to the latter. >"not sophisticated eno…

You could presumably come up with similar arguments for why Word (or equivalents) isn't "too complicated for simple tasks" and "not sophisticated enough for complex tasks", but, from experience, I'd argue that's also incorrect.

To be fair, I wasn't arguing in bad faith and I would've welcomed arguments (should you care enough to participate) to tell me why you are right. Instead you throw Word into the mix, for which those theories (perhaps ill-phrased, but I wouldn't call them arguments) can indeed be just as easily dismissed.

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

#453

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#454

Post by cosmiccatnap »

acid__ wrote: post #189
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…

Excel may have failed in this specific task, but let’s not pretend like its functionality doesn’t run circles around Google Docs and LibreOffice. Excel is a “pretty darn good” tool for 95% of tasks. If your work has highly varied workflows, then that flexibility more than makes up for its failures on the last 5%. If you have very specific workflows on the other hand, you may find value in replacing Excel with a speci…

We're not pretending. There are plenty of things that sheets can do that excel can't...it's not a new tool nor is it the best in it's class it's just got alot of bloatware preinstalled. For 99.9% of people the products are analogous, including sientists.

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

#455

Post by [deleted] »

jordigh wrote: post #7

To 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…

[deleted]

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

#456

Post by anameforauser »

jordigh wrote: post #7

To 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…

“Newton had a great time for a long time with his description [of gravity], and then at some point it was clear that that description was fraying at the edges, and then Einstein offered a more complete version,” As for flat spreadsheets, they serve their purpose just like any other tool. I don’t think I heard people complain about spreadsheets for dealing with flat data, the same way no one complains about hammers to deal with nails. If we’re trying to deal with interconnected and enterprise resources we don’t maintain those resources in Excel. We store them in Enterprise Resource Planning software or build relational databases (which are as old as gravity). Nothing is wrong with spreadsheets, they’re the sweetest way to deal with quick data until we use them for things they can’t do.

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

#457

Post by arrrg »

reportgunner wrote: post #220
owl57 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!?

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 agree with everything you are saying about sorting and I frequently use YYYY-MM-DD, however I do want to make one point: DD.MM.YYYY does make some human sense as a date format since the year is very rarely important (and if the year is actually important often the day is so unimportant that it can be left out), the month is sometimes important and the day is often the most relevant piece of information.

So for any kind of practical planning that day first order makes some sense, but I wouldn’t die on a hill for it.

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

#458

Post by arrrg »

tremon wrote: post #138
spuz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is "06.08.2020" unambiguous?

There are no conventions that write a date as mm.dd.yyyy, so if you encounter a date in that format, it is safe to assume dd.mm.yyyy. Contrast this with the slash or dash notation, where both mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy are prevalent in the world. But 2020-08-06 is unambiguous in the same way that 06.08.2020 is: the only convention in common use is yyyy-mm-dd.

Separating dates with dots (DD.MM.YYYY) is what’s taught in school in Germany.

So, yeah, there is a convention to write dates exactly that way.

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

#459

Post by arrrg »

lioeters wrote: post #361
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

> 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

Schools still teach DD.MM.YYYY. That’s what’s relevant because that’s what people actually widely use.

Shouldn’t Americans be very familiar with the idea that official norms (the metric system) play no role if the people don’t want to use them?

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

#460

Post by hermitcrab »

gverrilla wrote: post #438
hermitcrab wrote: post #398

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 th…

I'm a business guy, so I don't know much about it, but looks very useful and easy! I have been off the game for 5 years now, but I used to run a magento ecommerce, and I think your software might have helped managing products listings and stuff like that at the time. You might wanna take a look at this costumer segment, particularly small and medium businesses. They probably have a process for this already, but your…

Thanks. I will see what I can find out.
Post reply on HN