81–90 of 108 posts
So we blame the software instead of blaming the downright lazy people who can't be fucked learning an appropriate tool even though that's their entire career. Honestly these kind of things really wind me up.
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Even newcomers? I've had my education in a engineering focused campus so that may skew it, but even not IT related area had programming courses to, at least, learn the basics. Do the newer researcher still show reluctance to move from Excel or is it an old guard kind of deal?
>why stick with Excel versus using python, R or what have you to treat the data? [...] Do the newer researcher still show reluctance to move from Excel The feature of Excel that's underestimated/overlooked by skilled programmers of Python/R is that spreadsheets immediately expose an editable visual spatial canvas datagrid GUI . I have decades of programming C/C++/C#/Python/etc and yet I create new spreadsheets and us…
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A convenient cop out there. "I didn't install it, I only chose to use it for something it isnt suited for instead of looking for alternatives, not my fault"
People working in large organizations are frequently not even allowed to install software that isn’t pre-approved by N layers of management. The bottom line though is that Excel is made for data entry. If it’s not suitable for that use case, that’s a big problem with the product-market fit.
It is however most suited to accounting and logistics tasks. For any more novel use case, you’re going to have to put some thought into how you use it, or use a more suitable alternative. Even for the tasks that it’s very well suited to, there will always be more sophisticated alternatives. But I’d consider the way it lowers the the technical barriers to entry an overwhelming positive, even if it doesn’t completely absolve the users from learning about how their data works. I have the same frustrations with developers who have been trained by ORMs to have no idea how RDBMSes work. But I consider it their fault for not learning their trade properly, rather than the fault of the people who make nice tools to help them.
Excel is used as a database/storage/interchange format, especially after the initial analysis by someone who uses python or R. Bioinformatician does the analysis, then the PI wants to see it so they can Ctrl-F for genes they are interested in, so out comes an excel document. And really, even if you know python or R, are you really going to fire up a jupyter notebook, load the data, and run pandas queries every time s…
> Excel is used as a database/storage/interchange format, especially after the initial analysis by someone who uses python or R. Bioinformatician does the analysis Sometimes, but the situation is in reality worse than that. Excel is also used as the gold standard database/storage/interchange format of record for random shit that clinical researchers have typed in by hand whether directly or transcribed from other not…
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People working in large organizations are frequently not even allowed to install software that isn’t pre-approved by N layers of management. The bottom line though is that Excel is made for data entry. If it’s not suitable for that use case, that’s a big problem with the product-market fit.
I cannot imagine a single piece of software that is more widespread and used without issue by huge swathes of people than excel. But one specific use case for genetics means its totally unsuitable & and big problem with the product. Got it.
The issue is choosing the incorrect tool or if you have no choice but to use a spreadsheet failing to learn how your tools work.
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Yeah, that's also obnoxious. The Data From Text wizard lets you easily import the data... but if you do that then the first row no longer defaults to headers. So if you open it that way and want to filter or sort the data, your headers will disappear. You have to go into full blown Power Query to do both prevent reformatting and use column headers, and you have to reassign the data types on a much more complex interf…
> The Data From Text wizard lets you easily import the data... but if you do that then the first row no longer defaults to headers. So if you open it that way and want to filter or sort the data, your headers will disappear. You have to go into full blown Power Query to do both prevent reformatting and use column headers You don't, because while the wizard doesn't default to headers, the first screen of the wizard ha…
There is no checkbox in the wizard.
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People working in large organizations are frequently not even allowed to install software that isn’t pre-approved by N layers of management. The bottom line though is that Excel is made for data entry. If it’s not suitable for that use case, that’s a big problem with the product-market fit.
Excel isn’t a data entry tool. It’s a rather sophisticated analysis tool for tabular data. It’s success is derived from the fact that it’s very good at this, and is so easy for users to pick up. Mind boggling amounts of commerce and administration are driven my Excel. It is however most suited to accounting and logistics tasks. For any more novel use case, you’re going to have to put some thought into how you use it,…
So we blame the software instead of blaming the downright lazy people who can't be fucked learning an appropriate tool even though that's their entire career. Honestly these kind of things really wind me up.
There is one problem people have for their use case, so it’s inappropriate? Have you ever created an issue on some GitHub project? I guess you were using the wrong tool? People choose their tools for some reason(s), and there is no law of man or nature that says that using a common tool for some esoteric purpose is somehow wrong, just because you consider it too easy.
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I don't work in bioinformatics, but what you are describing is a completely accurate description of what I experienced working in manufacturing quality control. Raw data came in from suppliers in the form of spreadsheets, and management wanted to see results in spreadsheets. Meaning all our quality data was subjected to these issues. The date formatting issue was a particularly annoying "gotcha", particularly when fe…
> A lot of "safety culture" is composed of things like checklists and hazard warnings which are more geared towards shifting the blame for accidents onto somebody else than actually preventing those accidents, If you stay in spreadsheets these problems mostly don’t occur (that is, once data entry is squared away so that the initial spreadsheet has what you want it doesn't tend to get lost), its when you move in and o…