Why are they usin excel on the first place?
Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
471–480 of 518 posts
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I made no allusion to DMY and MDY being the only possibilities, because that would be ridiculous.
You did indeed. How else could you interpret this exchange?
>>> "01/02" does not translate to Jan 2nd in most of the world, because DMY is much more popular than MDY.
>> There's no year in 01/02. MD is more popular than DM.
> In which country do people use DMY, but also MD?
The only way to have that question make any sense at all is to assume that MDY and DMY are the only options. That certainly is ridiculous, but I'm not the one who said it.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah, that wasn't me, and that comment was already countered by pointing out there was plenty of competition in the spreadsheet market. My reaction was that a lot of people may not be aware of all the options and simply default to Excel because that's what they know.
You're claiming that they do know the alternatives but the alternatives fail in worse ways than Excel does.
I don't know what the magic sauce is that makes Excel so much better than the alternatives, or why it would be such a monstrous task to replicate that. My impression is just that to many people, Excel is simply the default tool to enter data in, no matter what the actual problems with Excel are. Excel is like gravity; good or bad, you put up with it because it is what it is. And if that's the case, that'd be pretty bad and in need of change, because Excel is not at all like gravity; it's merely one tool of many. If there's a more appropriate tool, people should use that. If there isn't, one could be developed.
I stand by my point that a standard data collection tool that modifies the data you put into it is a really bad idea for any field where accuracy and data integrity is important, and I'd expect science to be one of those fields. You may be able to work around the limitations of the tool, but the risk is still there.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#474Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Only everybody knows what excel is, and no one knows Matrix.
And unfortunately my guess is that most Excel users don't surf HN or other geek sites.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#476Earlier 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…
> It can't change this behavior They could easily make it an optional behaviour.
In other words, a quirks mode.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#477It'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...)
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!?
Because it's meant for human consumption.
Day and month is usually relevant, while year is less so, so let's put it last.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think the arguments are stronger against Word than they are for Excel, but they're similar.
If you want to run some simple calculations on numbers, Excel is vastly overpowered and baroque. New version? Hope you've learned the new magic series of GUI clicks. Just like Word, Excel files are not inspectable (again, more baroque 'magic').
I can easily run calculations on plain texts tables in Emacs (along with the normal conveniences of being able to reorder by row, column; apply formulae across a range of cells etc.). And that's all displayed in plain text. And I can easily add new functions, keybindings, whatever, to suit my needs.
But the fact that you say the arguments against Word "can indeed be just as easily dismissed" makes it unlikely that this is likely to be a productive dialogue.
For Word, it's way more complicated than most people need, and again, users are at the (non-existing) mercy of the application. It's not very user-configurable - you have to learn how Word expects you to do things. Again, its data files are non-inspectable monstrosities, with minor corruption causing complete corruption, and fragility between versions.
I manipulate text for a living. For simpler things, it's much easier and productive to use something like Markdown or (for more complex things) something like Org-mode. For complex things, I need LaTeX - Word simply lacks necessary functionality.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#479Excel isn't the program of choice for most scientists and computational biologists, who typically use R, python, or command line tools. However, we often get data from other scientists or reanalyze data from other groups that can have these errors. It's so frequent of a problem that there are scientific papers about it [1]. [1] https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...
Those tools aren’t exclusive.
I use python almost exclusively for data analysis but still open files in excel to view them for lots of reasons.
Nothing in excel is reproducible, but it’s still on all my computers.
Did an analysis a few years ago of the programs run At my organization by job series and scientists run a lot of excel.
Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates
#480If the scientists had asked someone who knew Excel well, then they would have been told to prevent autocorrect from running enter ’MARCH1 with the apostrophe at the start.
This. Why does nobody know this?