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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

#461

Post by lemmonii »

arrrg wrote: post #458
tremon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Read the comment again...

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

#462

Post by reportgunner »

arrrg wrote: post #457
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 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…

I see where you are coming from, but I would argue that if you omit a part, it's not a date anymore.

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

#463

Post by reportgunner »

BbzzbB wrote: post #447
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sweet spot being "too complicated for simple tasks" and "not sophisticated enough for complex tasks"?

>"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…

> How can Excel possibly be too complicated for simple tasks?

Excel is too complicated to send an e-mail for example. You can send e-mail from excel but it's much simpler to do in Outlook.

Excel is too complicated for simple math = if you want to do 1024*436 it is better to fire up a calculator rather than wait for excel to start up.

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

#465

Post by mcv »

emteycz wrote: post #432
mcv wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where am I talking about forcing them? You're the only one bringing that up, and I strongly disagree with it. Education is not force, it's empowering. The only reason they want to use a tool that doesn't really fit their use case, is because they're not aware of better tools. I find it very hard to believe that scientists actually want to use a tool that corrupts their data. If that is true, then that is absolutely a…

You're taking a minor, very unusual issue that happens only to a subset of a subset of a subset of users and resolving it with regulation , while forgeting all the cases where Excel works perfectly for them. Libreoffice is good, but it has much more warts than Excel does and the presentantion capabilities (a key functionality) simply are not as good.

Are you seriously opposed to education because you see it as regulation?

Also, I don't think it's a very minor issue if the tool you use to process your data, changes your data. It may only do that in limited cases, but the fact that it does it at all should alarm anyone who cares about data integrity.

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

#466

Post by kergonath »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #446
kergonath wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which country do people use DMY, but also MD? This just sounds wrong, and my (admittedly limited) sampling shows that when DMY is abbreviated it becomes DM. 01/02 is still the 1st of February everywhere I went except in the US.

Who said someone used DMY combined with MD? DMY/MDY is not an exhaustive list of date formats, you know. It is not even an exhaustive list of "incredibly common date formats".

You said “MD is more popular than DM”. In most countries I’ve been to DM and DMY are used more or less interchangeably (with different separators). However, I have never seen anyone use MD, though I assume it happens in the US.

I made no allusion to DMY and MDY being the only possibilities, because that would be ridiculous.

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

#467

Post by HiFaraz »

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…

But they did pick a better tool: they changed the name. Nomenclature is also technology.

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

#468

Post by wesleywt »

erAck wrote: post #342
otherme123 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LibreOffice AND Google Docs fall in the same exact spot than Excel here. Try it. Type "SEPT-2" or "SEPT2" in any of them and see what happens.

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

Some biologist will write a gene as Sept-2. Its best to change the name so that its not a date.

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

#469

Post by TomMarius »

mcv wrote: post #465
emteycz wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're taking a minor, very unusual issue that happens only to a subset of a subset of a subset of users and resolving it with regulation , while forgeting all the cases where Excel works perfectly for them. Libreoffice is good, but it has much more warts than Excel does and the presentantion capabilities (a key functionality) simply are not as good.

Are you seriously opposed to education because you see it as regulation? Also, I don't think it's a very minor issue if the tool you use to process your data, changes your data. It may only do that in limited cases, but the fact that it does it at all should alarm anyone who cares about data integrity.

> This is the exact sort of thing that indicates market-power being concentrated to a point requiring severe, acute regulatory action.

This is what I react to. Sorry I missed that you're not the original commenter, that's my bad.

I am not sure though what other tool should the biologists learn - they usually know R and Python and they use Excel because they need what Excel offers; there isn't any other software that allows them to easily do whatever they need to do with the data, quickly iterating on the ideas AND then present it nicely.

The solution here should be to fix Excel, but it really is a small issue (that has been worked around, too; and if you know how to use excel correctly, it does not happen to you) compared to making another Excel, which seems like a monstrous task.

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

#470

Post by pratio »

pmarreck wrote: post #297
pratio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True in every sense. We shifted from google sheets to O365, there's just no way to go around excel. Its efficient and every one from a novice to expert can find their way around it.

Pray tell, why did you switch from Sheets?

The dataset was growing and sheets were slowing down. Excel installed locally on a machine with good hardware is a pleasure to work with. As the team grew more and more people were asking for office licenses and like i said, we have colleagues who've been using excel for ages and they like to have 2-3 files open on multiple screens and work between files using references. It's just not as fast as using excel locally.

I'd like to add that we also had an issue with our clients using only excel and there were issues with calculations not working, not so often but with enough people making noise our management decided to get the subscription. I've been using sheets for years even as a student when i couldn't afford an office license.

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