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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

#491

Post by glofish »

FabHK wrote: post #184
glofish wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is shortsighted to call this behavior a "useful feature". It was and is a grave and serious mistake. Automatically converting SEPT1 to a date caused far more damage than the benefit of the fleeting convenience. The damage that this "feature" caused and will keep causing goes far beyond the domain of bioinformatics. Even in bioinformatics things have not been "solved", for the next decade the same gene will have tw…

> Automatically converting SEPT1 to a date caused far more damage than the benefit of the fleeting convenience. Who are you to judge? For the novice, even for most users it'll be what they want. And for the expert (or even intermediate user) it is trivial to override.

How exactly would you trivially correct the massive number of published results in genomics data where SEPT1 was converted to a date?

20% of publications had errors introduced by Excel in them! The real number is probably much higher (Nature had a rate of 35%). What is the rationale in saying that the benefits must still be worth it?

See: Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...

The root of the problem is not about how Excel displays information, or how Excel parses the data but that the data it tacitly changed upon saving it.

Open a CSV file that has SEPT1, don't take any action, save it right away. Boom, the data has been changed and you cannot recover the original information.

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

#492

Post by BbzzbB »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #478
BbzzbB wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 norm…

Well, I will see myself out as this is indeed an unproductive conversation, it feels like I am speaking to a Linux zealot about why my grandmother has no need for Arch. But just to answer a last time, inspecting files is in no way something the average MS Office user has any need to do, it has nothing to do with the conversation really.

So, Excel is to complex for simple calculation, but you expect my mother and nearly retired colleagues who never used non-GUI apps to learn emacs to add two columns together? Is this a joke? Besides, the fact you can do it so much easier with emacs, regardless of the veracity, is fallacious at best and says nothing of Excel.

Yeah, you need to learn how the program works, that's how programs always work. Are you telling me you didn't need to learn how emacs and Latex work when you first tried it? I for one have never met someone who didn't learn how to use Word, it's pretty damn easy.

>I manipulate text for a living

Here, we find the problem. You are a specialist and you seemingly lost touch with the way average people use Excel and Word. The only argument I see in these two comments is that Excel and Word are not suited for specialist needs, which is probably true, but I don't see a hint of why they are not suited for basic operations or their intended use cases. So I will see myself out, thanks.

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

#493

Post by jandrese »

catalogia wrote: post #450
jandrese wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auto-formatting seems like more of a noob feature than a power user feature. Lacking control over when it happens is definitely not a power user feature.

Treating SEPT1 as a date is behavior that will be correct for the vast majority of users, be they noob or experienced, and only incorrect for a very tiny minority of users who are doing things related to genetics. This sort of auto-completion feature is orthogonal to the noob/power user axis, except insofar as the user is expected to know how to circumvent this behavior if/when they need to.

The power user behavior would be to only do the conversion on cells that are typed as DATE datatype. But that would catch the noobs who don't know to set the cell type.

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

#494

Post by BbzzbB »

reportgunner wrote: post #463
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…

> 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.

That's irrelevant tho, Excel isn't meant to be Outlook so why should it also be able to send email straightforwardly? The fact you're even able to send one thru VBA to me shows it is not "too simple for complex tasks", albeit probably ill-suited in this case (and many more, but that's besides the point).

And while the calculator might be marginally faster if you exclude start-time, Excel is still perfectly fine for your use-case it only requires to type one extra symbol than the calculator, namely "=1024*436[ENTER]". Hell, it's probably faster to do it in Excel if you already have an active window. I don't see how it could possibly fulfill the task in a simpler manner.

Is R a bad statistical tool because I can't use it as Photoshop?

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

#495

Post by _4570 »

jandrese wrote: post #369
wombatpm wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better learn to properly import data via csv. If you just double click you get the excel helpfulness. If you choose open you can specify the column formats. I load dates and zip codes as text and then format the columns correctly AFTER everything loads. VBA macros are wonderful if you have the same format over and over again. If I has a nickle for everytime excel munged a date or stripped a leading zero from a zip co…

I've always been surprised at how bad Excel is at importing CSV files. The solution feels like it was hacked together by an intern over the weekend even though this is an incredibly common use case. I had to build a very basic CSV->XLS tool once because the built-in CSV import kept screwing up. Admittedly the CSV files were slightly mis-formatted in places, but that wasn't the only headache with the import.

It's really good these days compared to a few years back. You just need to use the import feature in the Data ribbon menu instead of just double clicking on the csv file. This way you get to use the "Power Query" tool that allows you to import a csv file a lot more precisely.

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

#496

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Zetaphor wrote: post #445
mr_toad wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can't change this behavior They could easily make it an optional behaviour.

Exactly, add a checkbox in the settings menu and the problem is solved for everyone.

> "Exactly, add a checkbox in the settings menu and the problem is solved for everyone."

A million checkboxes in the settings menu later, people will be griping that "Excel is terrible for having all these crazy settings to deal with!"

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

#497

Post by WorldMaker »

mmcgaha wrote: post #106
rkachowski wrote: post #80

My mind is blown that Excel's usability is so bad that the representation of the human genome itself has to adapt around it's undesired behaviour. As in, the history of genetics research is now irreversibly linked with the shortcomings of this one software product, which just happens to be incapable of describing the genetics of the organisms that created it.

I hate to sound like a salty old IT guy, but here we go. It is not the fault of Excel that people are using it wrong. They have the ability to import the data as text but they skip that step all together. If the user does not say up front what the column is, Excel has to guess. If Excel didn't try to guess, someone would be making a comment on how bad usability is when an obvious date field was getting interpreted as…

It's also behavior that goes back to the Ancient Times and predecessors such as Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Even ancient ones will tell you if you need to enter a thing and it has to be text and only text precede it with a quote mark, ie 'MARCH1, just as you would precede a formula with =. It's Spreadsheet 101 knowledge dating back many decades.

The clickbait headline is fun, but the real headline is more like "Scientists find it easier to rename things than learn the basics of data entry in the tools they use".

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

#498

Post by importantbrian »

goatlover wrote: post #404
importantbrian wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever people ask me about getting into the field and if they should learn Python or R or Scala or whatever else, I always respond with you need to get really good with excel/Google Sheets and SQL. Then worry about everything else. I can't tell you how many times I've done an analysis I'm really proud of in something like R Markdown only to have the end user say that's great now can I get it in an excel? I just del…

> good with excel/Google Sheets and SQL Those aren't very good for cleaning and wrangling data, even if the output for analysis ends up being a spreadsheet.

Agreed that spreadsheets aren't great for that, but totally disagree about SQL. SQL is the best cleaning and wrangling data tool out there. There's a reason the trend in the industry is towards tools like DBT. There are certainly things for which you need to use Python or R, but for 95% of tasks some combination of SQL and a spreadsheet will get you where you need to go.

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

#499

Post by boublepop »

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…

Excel doesn’t care about backwards compatibility. Random things break every single major update. If only the breaks were because they where fixing these extremely annoying “features” then it would be understandable, but no, they persist.

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

#500

Post by iterati »

ubermonkey wrote: post #481
VonGallifrey wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People wanted this because some (dumb) people insisted that "well, that task CANT move because it has to be done by then!" So? There are tasks like this that simply CANT move, why should a project management tool not have the ability to model that? If you don't like the feature you don't have to use it. I get that you wouldn't want these fixed dates and if you can just plan and execute your project by yourself, but…

This is such a "peak HN" kind of response. I've been working with scheduling and project management tools for 20 years -- not just MS Project (widely regarded as the idiot cousin of the market, honestly) but also things like Primavera. There's no reason to have a "manual" task in a scheduling tool. First, if you have a task that can't move, you set it with a deadline and watch your deadline (as well as watching to se…

This feels more "peak HN" than the previous poster as it's dripping with self-importance and condescension.
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