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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)

#101

Post by acdha »

cedilla wrote: post #89
dacryn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would be so easy to just implement an opt-out function, but Microsoft doesn't want to. There doesn't have to be a tradeoff if you make it optional.

An opt-out doesn't solve the problem, because one person in the chain of custody if an excel file who hasn't opted out would be enough to destroy the data.

Only if the option was implemented as a user preference which isn’t stored in the file. The right way to do this would be to add the flag as a file header, and give people a UI control to set it by default. That way you’d always see spreadsheets as the person who gave it to you did, and you would create new ones with your preferred behavior.

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

#102

Post by mnau »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #36

Why not use LibreOffice instead?

Because it's garbage. I mean it. Try enter some text to search autofilter 100k rows on LO and Excel. In Excel, it's instant, in LO, I have to go make a coffee.

LO 10 seconds, while being frozen (command is likely sync). Excel 2 seconds, while being responsive (command is likely async).

There is a saying that you only use 5% of Excel, but everyone uses different 5%. LO is full of stuff like that. Not to mention subtle differences from Excel that (likely) stems from Excel being having it's internal structure aligned with (barely documented) xlsx while LO is aligned with .ods.

LO is useful if you just want to make some simple stuff and you don't interact with rest of the world. If you need both, you are only asking for trouble.

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

#103

Post by nbadg »

shaan7 wrote: post #86
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.

Call it cynicism but I think humans just prefer things to be implicit. I've been annoyed by how people do not want to be specific, but then rant about how someone did not understand exactly what they wanted. A certain CEO says that we won't need programming languages because you will be able to program AI systems with natural language. Well, the problem with natural language is not that we do not have the tech, it is…

The thing is, most of the time, you can actually have both. You just have to spend the time to build systems that way.

To use the example from the article: spreadsheets could use strongly-typed columns, but guess the column type automatically based on the values entered. When things go right, it'd be just as easy as today, but if things go wrong, you always have an escape hatch: with a little more work, you can manually specify the column type. Problem solved. That gives you the increased productivity you want for the happy case, without the frustration of trying to find a workaround for the corner case. This kind of approach needs more architecture work at the beginning of a project, but it's almost always feasible.

That being said, I think your frustration is warranted, although I think it's much more pervasive than tech. At its core, I think the problem is that, in your example, the CEO and the programmer are having two different conversations without really realizing it. The CEO wants a problem solved, but the programmer wants the tools to solve the problem themselves. The CEO thinks that ML should be able to solve their problem, but the programmer sees that ML as a tool has serious limitations, and won't help solve under-specification. And then they both end up talking past each other.

It seems that a lot of (at least western society) is built around the idea that when someone asks for help, what they "really" want is, metaphorically, to be given a fish for dinner, instead of learning how to fish. That's the CEO in your example; the presumption is "I want help" means "solve my problem", not "make it easy for me to solve my problem myself". It's one of my biggest frustrations, because it inherently robs you of agency and in many cases can be downright condescending -- for example, when I was working as a mechanical engineer, there were shop floor guys ignoring the tolerances I specified on my drawings because they assumed I was over-specifying them, because they lacked the context of the rest of the design, and weren't willing to sit down to hear the bigger picture. But when I had to send the parts back for re-work, they acted like it was my fault.

Anyways, this is all a really long-winded way of saying, I think this is largely a social problem, not a technological one. But I don't think it's inherent in humans; I think this is something we've learned as a part of our culture.

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

#104

Post by makeitdouble »

acdha wrote: post #101
cedilla wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An opt-out doesn't solve the problem, because one person in the chain of custody if an excel file who hasn't opted out would be enough to destroy the data.

Only if the option was implemented as a user preference which isn’t stored in the file. The right way to do this would be to add the flag as a file header, and give people a UI control to set it by default. That way you’d always see spreadsheets as the person who gave it to you did, and you would create new ones with your preferred behavior.

Channeling my inner QA person, this breaks in many subtle and not so subtle ways:

- people love to export as CSV. And I kinda understand them, csv looks simple enough, what could go wrong ?

- other spreadsheet softs need to recognize the same field and act the same way. Google Sheets, LibreOffice, KingSoft's one etc. Not counting old office versions that aren't updated anymore, because the owner doesn't want to move into the cloud.

- the flag needs to stay when moving sheets around, copy to another set, etc.

That could still be better than nothing. But could still lead to catastrophic loses as people get used to it working most of the time, there's no perfect solution.

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

#105

Post by cedilla »

acdha wrote: post #101
cedilla wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An opt-out doesn't solve the problem, because one person in the chain of custody if an excel file who hasn't opted out would be enough to destroy the data.

Only if the option was implemented as a user preference which isn’t stored in the file. The right way to do this would be to add the flag as a file header, and give people a UI control to set it by default. That way you’d always see spreadsheets as the person who gave it to you did, and you would create new ones with your preferred behavior.

Still the same problems. Unless you exclude people with older excel versions they can still ruin the file. And if the first person in the chain didn't make the change, who would even notice it? So we're back at requiring extreme vigilance without any assurance.

Also keep in mind that the first person doesn't necessarily use excel at all. The file might start and end as a text file or TSV.

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

#106

Post by emporas »

One good solution rather than Excel is org-mode. See the original Google talk by org-mode creator [1]. At some point 30 minutes or so, he explains how to use org-mode as a spreadsheet.

Not so powerful as Excel, even though missing features might be trivially added. I haven't tried it myself but i want to really dive into it's functionality. Org-mode is really great at many things, spreadsheets might as well be one more.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM

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

#108

Post by mnau »

hulitu wrote: post #71
chrisjj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen no evidence this is a bug.

> I've seen no evidence this is a bug. Maybe it depends on your use case, but why it converts almost everything to dates ? Why not to numbers ?

Users enter text. That's how it always has been, because they use keyboard.

If format is set to General, Excel tries to make the best guess what is inputted and convert it to that value, so things like SUM work. That is very sensible behavior.

Your accountant doesn't want to set format and only then enter number. She has a job to do, so just do it for her.

Same thing for dates. This guessing algorithm has some edge behavior, but always happens. C# DateTime.TryParse("DEC12") will deduce date is 2012-12-01. Yay?

Do you want to keep it as text? Add ' as a first character (it's not considered a part of the string) or format cells to non-General format (e.g. Text) before entering a text.

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

#109

Post by CoastalCoder »

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.

> We, as CS people, think computers are easy.

I'd say we have a better understanding of which parts are necessarily / accidentally / capriciously / deceptively hard.

And it's certainly subjective. E.g., Python's dynamism (typing, etc.) really trips me up, but others feel the same about strong static typing.

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

#110

Post by heckelson »

sandworm101 wrote: post #51
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?

A consumer asking Microsoft for a feature? Thats like asking a mountain to build you a house. Ask all you want. The mountain is physically unable to comprehend your existance, let alone address your concerns. I want an "always on top" feature for the default windows interface i am forced to use at work. Never going to happen. I want to remove all thise stupid references to 3d objects and VR that clutter some windows…

Regarding the always on top: Microsoft PowerToys includes a module that can pin windows to the top, maybe that would help with that?
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