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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

#501

Post by IgniteTheSun »

owl57 wrote: post #119
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...)

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!?

I wish more people complied with ISO 8601.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Even better, wish everyone would standardize on:

* YYYYMMDD for dates

* YYYY-MM for months

* YYYYMMDDTHHMM for time where T is the capital letter T. Two additional digits can be added for seconds and then as many additional digits as needed for precision.

------------------

[Edited for format]

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

#502

Post by kergonath »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #472
kergonath wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

For fuck’s sake. It’s simple, really: - DMY is much more popular than MDY, in almost all of Europe, Africa, South America, and in large parts of Asia. - DM is a common short form of DMY when the year is not ambiguous => I highly doubt your assertion that MD is more popular than DM, and in fact I am certain that 1 February is a much more common way of parsing 01/02 than 2 January.

Note that none of these points require the absence of any other way of writing dates. You could indeed argue, preferably with examples and not hypotheticals, that some locales exist in which MD would be the natural way, and that they outweigh the others.

Now you can move the goalposts once more if you really need to. It really is tedious.

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

#503

Post by ubermonkey »

iterati wrote: post #500
ubermonkey wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or, you know, actual knowledge about the problem domain. But you do you.

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

#504

Post by FrojoS »

pintxo wrote: post #366
FrojoS wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual way to write the date Feb 1st in Germany (and I think anywhere but the US) is 01.02 or 1.2. but not 01/02 And the . is part of the num block as well. Also, data being interpreted different based on region/language settings is a sure way to end up with bugs, so I think its a terrible thing that Excel does this.

a) You write "1/2" and Excel replaces it with "01. Feb" by default if using de-DE as Locale (just checked it) [This auto replacement is also the basis of the linked article] b) There is no "." on the num-pad for German keyboard layouts, they have a "," the German decimal separator.

Damn, you‘re right about the comma on German num blocks. I’ve avoided anything but US Keyboards for over a decade. Local keyboards are just another pain, like OS wide locals.

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

#505

Post by trianglem »

gmfawcett wrote: post #430
trianglem wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve been had

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

#506

Post by jackvalentine »

WorldMaker wrote: post #497
mmcgaha wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "Scienti…

> It's Spreadsheet 101 knowledge dating back many decades.

Astounding, I've literally never heard of this in the 20 years or so I've been using spreadsheets. I'll be using it from now on!

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

#508

Post by dirtnugget »

jtdev wrote: post #143
vsareto wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's honestly amazing that Excel hasn't fixed this issue. I'm surprised there hasn't been a dotfile option added yet

Maybe a registry edit?

Sure, open the gates to hell.

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

#510

Post by ImaCake »

otherme123 wrote: post #249
Duller-Finite wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I'm in favor of this change in nomenclature.

IMO the change is good, but is a case of detected vs undetected. Recently I was working with some colleagues, being I the computer savvy and them the lab people. I send them some data in CSV, that when opened in Excel turned 123.456 into 123456 (it was a problem with locales, some people using "," as decimal and some using "."). We noticed because the values should be between 0 and 1000. But what if the column could…

Excel technically has a type system where you can change the type of value a cell has. In my experience it is difficult to convince excel to actually change the cell's data type sometimes. Doing so can often change the underlying data as well. Personally I avoid excel if I can, because it's quirks are just too frustrating. But it certainly has its uses.
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