Serious question, is this a viable area for a startup product? Obviously nothing will easily displace Excel for general spreadsheet work, but I could see room for a domain-specific spreadsheet that has core features and supports just a basic set of functions relevant to genomics, + a "we won't fuck up your data" feature.
Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
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Re: Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
#12Can anyone with first hand experience on this tell shed some light on why stick with Excel versus using python, R or what have you to treat the data?
Given that these are relatively unskilled users, would switching away from Excel increase or decrease errors? I don't think it's a given that errors would decrease by switching away from Excel.
Anecdotically, I was talking to an acquaintance who decided to pick up R as a replacement for excel for data analysis and they were positively blown away by the possibilities opened by the new mindset that came with programming.
So yes, maybe these "relatively unskilled users" will struggle for a few weeks/months, but it will be a net positive change as many of them will see immense benefit after some tinkering.
Re: Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that these are relatively unskilled users, would switching away from Excel increase or decrease errors? I don't think it's a given that errors would decrease by switching away from Excel.
Switch to what? Excel is everywhere. People are familiar with it. The same people are often not familiar with, and have never used, and may even be confused by “notepad.exe”.
These aren't someone's 85 year old grandparent getting a computer for the first time to look at pictures of their great grandchildren, these are people who have used a computer every day since they were 14 and have advanced STEM degrees. I think they are probably re-trainable.
Re: Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
#14Serious question, is this a viable area for a startup product? Obviously nothing will easily displace Excel for general spreadsheet work, but I could see room for a domain-specific spreadsheet that has core features and supports just a basic set of functions relevant to genomics, + a "we won't fuck up your data" feature.
>a "we won't fuck up your data" feature
That's a hard to implement feature. Hand waving and buzzword lingo will not be enough for people to believe it.
Re: Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
#15Can anyone with first hand experience on this tell shed some light on why stick with Excel versus using python, R or what have you to treat the data?
I took a programming for math majors course in college, and the largest challenge for the class was understanding procedural looping to process data sets. Understanding a for loop or a while loop really was a hard concept for someone to understand. We didn't cover any real data structures, and everything was a 2 dimensional array.
Excel, and most spreadsheets for that, avoid some of the basic control structures beginners find challenging. Many functions are basically map and reduce functions so you typically are getting the same number of cells back, or one. Often maps are done visually in the spreadsheet with a formula being applied to every cell in a column.
Re: Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
#16Can anyone with first hand experience on this tell shed some light on why stick with Excel versus using python, R or what have you to treat the data?
Because an absolutely enormous number of people involved in all ends of genomics and biomedical science have absolutely no inkling whatsoever about programming. Furthermore, Microsoft office is installed everywhere everywhere everywhere… like it leave it love it or hate it, it doesn’t matter… it’s true (at least for huge swaths of the demographic). So the first thing most people learn is excel and the last thing most…
Yeah. At some point though, people who want to do something that requires python or R, but refuse to learn it, and then use Excel (and make mistakes like the article mentions) should reconsider their choices. This is really out of character for me, but in this instance, relying on excel to do everything is a mistake by the user, not Microsoft's ridiculous data destroying import function.
Use the right tool.
Re: Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
#17Can anyone with first hand experience on this tell shed some light on why stick with Excel versus using python, R or what have you to treat the data?
From my experience Python/R can be great when you have large scale analysis to do but if you have a task that requires more manual fiddling with the data then it’s much nicer to use Excel.
Re: Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
#18Serious question, is this a viable area for a startup product? Obviously nothing will easily displace Excel for general spreadsheet work, but I could see room for a domain-specific spreadsheet that has core features and supports just a basic set of functions relevant to genomics, + a "we won't fuck up your data" feature.
That’s an expensive workaround to just formatting your cells as text before entering the values
Re: Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
#19We need a clippy type feature "It looks like you are working on genomics data, should I turn off all the data destroying auotcorrect features?"
Re: Autocorrect errors in Excel still creating genomics headache
#20This exact problem burned me when I started doing transcriptomics, one of the things I found that helps mitigate the problem is to always keep both the gene symbol and a ID like an Ensemble or Entrez ID for every data point because those don’t get mangled by Excel