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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)

#61

Post by chrisjj »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #58
dmz73 wrote: post #18

Or they could set the format of the column to text instead of keeping it as general and everything would just work. If these "scientists" are having this problem then they haven't spent any time at all learning how to use the tool they rely on. Can we trust anything these people produce if this is the level of competence they have with Excel?

It’s utterly unreasonable of you to expect that your drive-by HN comment solves this problem for an entire community of people. This really just comes across as unproductive snark.

> It’s utterly unreasonable of you to expect that your drive-by HN comment solves this problem for an entire community of people.

I'd say more unreasonable is for you to mischaracterise this comment as you have done.

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

#63

Post by wiseowise »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #53
knighthack wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this thread: guy pretends to think he's different from the rest, and is able to distinguish the "key issue" unlike everyone else - and of what purportedly doesn't matter, like the name of something.

I don't have to distinguish anything, I just have to the humility to listen to what the experts say, rather than a bunch of webdevs. EDIT: Also, i'm not a biologist, but I see the same phenomenon in finance where a bunch of low pay webdevs nobodies refuse to make an effort to understand why Excel is popular, push their half backed solutions, and then are confused that nobody uses them, and frustrated when showed for…

What difference does it make if they’re low paid or not?

If you want to sound reasonable, at least try to hide your contempt.

Better luck next time.

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

#64

Post by tssva »

bayindirh wrote: post #25
JimmyAustin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of analysis is done using CSVs being pushed in and out of Excel. Doing so strips the formatting. Please understand the workflows being crying “skill issue”.

Yes, but you can create a small macro to the change the formatting and assign that to your table. Your CSV should import deterministically. That's not impossible to do. I saw a complete analysis engine written as an Excel file, which accepts and exports CSVs cleanly. It can be done.

You don’t even need to write a macro. Excel’s Import Text Wizard will allow you to assign data type to each column at the time of import.

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

#65

Post by pfisherman »

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…

These gene names are human readable strings, not concept unique identifiers. We in bioinformatics / comp bio world strongly encourage the use of ncbi or ensmbl gene IDs. In general it is bad practice to use human readable “names” of things as a primary indexing key.

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

#66

Post by chimprich »

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?

It's not just a question of individual research groups deciding to use a different tool.

Even if you're conscientious enough to handle this issue, the automatic conversion could come and cause you problems from anyone you share data with: medical teams, grad students, administrators...

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

#67

Post by M95D »

I'm really annoyed that even Open/LibreOffice copied this crap behaviour.

I try to avoid spreadsheets. I won't use them unless there's calculations to be done.

When I do use them, the first thing when I create a new sheet is to select all cells and set it to text. It's probably a bad habit, but it's the only way to avoid future frustration and mistakes.

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

#68

Post by throw_pm23 »

hiddencost wrote: post #17
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #4

I think implicit conversions is the other billion dollar mistake in computing. It just shows up as a subtle source of mistakes in so many places. JavaScript, MySQL, YAML, Excel, PHP, just to make a few off the top of my head, have all caused countless bugs and security exploits due to implicit conversations of data which can be interpreted in multiple ways, and where the system happened to pick the wrong one.

A billion dollars isn't really that much money. You see billion dollar mistakes all the time at big companied

A billion here, a billion there, soon you are talking real money.

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

#70

Post by ivanche »

stef25 wrote: post #69

Isn't it possible to just set the format of the cell to plain text ? Whoever works with genetic data in Excel should know how to do this, if correct.

Whenever a question contains "just", the answer is 99.9% "no".
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