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Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

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Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#41

Post by n4r9 »

bayindirh wrote: post #33
n4r9 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It can be done" is a far cry from "it's reasonable to expect scientists to do this".

As a person who does research and support researchers, I can't see the gap, sorry. I understand some people don't know it's possible, and some don't care, but for any competent researcher, it's expected them to master the tools they use. This is esp. true for career researchers.

I'm not disputing that a competent computer user can do it. From the perspective of "this is what I would do if I was a scientist", you're totally correct.

But when you're writing guidelines for an entire field - as the article describes HGNC doing - you're catering to all researchers in that field: good, bad, and ugly. Plus technicians, editors, admins and anyone else that might handle the files. Given how hidden and unintuitive Excel's behaviour is here, I think what they're doing makes sense.

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#42

Post by mnw21cam »

bayindirh wrote: post #26
mo_42 wrote: post #8

As a computer scientist this sounds ridiculous. Especially that they restrict themselves to Latin letters and Arabic numbers. I guess many people here will point out that they should use other tools. I think we should help them in any way. They could also prefix every gene with Gn so it cannot be confused with other acronyms (e.g., GnDEC12). It not only breaks parsing by computers but also by humans who might read of…

We, as CS people, think computers are easy. However, for other disciplines, computers are not easy. We can try to (and do) create tools, but it's not as simple as a table editor or a simple CRUD application. Scenarios has many peculiarities and edge cases.

A fair proportion of CS is precisely oriented around the fact that computers are not easy in ways that non-CS people don't realise, and provides methods for quantifying and trying to cope with that. I refer you to https://xkcd.com/2030/

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#43

Post by michaelt »

KwisatzHaderack wrote: post #6

So let me get this straight: Scientists would rather rename genes, than to simply use a tool other than MS Excel?

Spreadsheets are irreplaceable because they're the only no-code software development tool that's ever succeeded.

Nothing will ever replace spreadsheets, because the tech industry no longer believes in making products for power users. In modern thinking, any form of user training is an indication your product is too complicated, and any feature only used by 5% of users should be removed.

The idea of a product where users have to type in incantations like =VLOOKUP(A1,C2:D16,2,False) which they're just supposed to somehow know? A product that's essentially unusable on mobile? A product with features like 'Pivot Table' that only 1% of users ever use, and yet it's a vital core feature?

It's absurd. Only in 1970 could someone have conceived of such a thing.

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#44

Post by smeej »

The article has now been edited to note that Excel now offers a toggle to turn this feature off.

How long did the entire genetics community struggle with this problem before deciding to rename a bunch of genes, making their own data harder to search, without just...asking Microsoft to add a new toggle for their use case?

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#45

Post by [deleted] »

n4r9 wrote: post #35
otherme123 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of scientists are very bright people that can't invest the time to learn another tool that maybe is worse than Excel (e.g. Google Docs also does the gene-to-date swapping, try writting "SEPT2", the known gene [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPT2 ] in a cell), investing time and effort in changing pipelines that work for them. Instead, the path of least resistance is to change the name of all known genes that c…

When I had this issue, the path of least resistance was to use Libre Office Calc. Of course, that's exactly the kind of application that my company now wants to remove from all systems for compliance with something called "Cyber Essentials".

[deleted]

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#46

Post by lloydatkinson »

smeej wrote: post #44

The article has now been edited to note that Excel now offers a toggle to turn this feature off. How long did the entire genetics community struggle with this problem before deciding to rename a bunch of genes, making their own data harder to search, without just...asking Microsoft to add a new toggle for their use case?

Has anyone ever had any luck asking a large organisation, such as Microsoft, for anything good or meaningful changes? Without a huge controversy or media outcry?

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#49

Post by Retr0id »

smeej wrote: post #44

The article has now been edited to note that Excel now offers a toggle to turn this feature off. How long did the entire genetics community struggle with this problem before deciding to rename a bunch of genes, making their own data harder to search, without just...asking Microsoft to add a new toggle for their use case?

Getting media attention is the fast path if you can manage it, and even that took over 3 years, based on the dates mentioned.

Re: Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

#50

Post by waffleiron »

smeej wrote: post #44

The article has now been edited to note that Excel now offers a toggle to turn this feature off. How long did the entire genetics community struggle with this problem before deciding to rename a bunch of genes, making their own data harder to search, without just...asking Microsoft to add a new toggle for their use case?

It has always been an option, however it's easy to miss it's happening when it happens to a really small subset of genes you are importing into an excel sheet. Most of the time people just don't pay attention, and excel does whatever is useful for most people (i.e. not biologists).

Worked in bioinformatics in the past, and I think this is just an issue with people not knowing it did happen. You have many new biologists joining the field every day, people are going to mess up if the standard excel option is conversion.

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