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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)

#141

Post by smeej »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #126
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?

About 20 years. And people have been begging Microsoft to add that toggle the entire time. It apparently took longer than naming the genes did. If you're having a problem, "just ask Microsoft" is about the worst possible plan to try and get it fixed. They don't GAF. And why should they? It's not like it cost them any money. Even if everybody stopped using Excel for data involving gene names they're not gonna stop usi…

I'm just thinking the entire genetics community has to be gigantic, and they can't be the only ones with frustration about an auto-changing feature. Surely lots of somebodies in genetics know somebodies at Microsoft who might be arsed to surface a relatively simple toggle.

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

#142

Post by acdha »

makeitdouble wrote: post #104
acdha wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It might be easier to think about as the difference between perfection and practical improvements. Right now 100% of Excel users are at risk of silent data corruption. The proposed change would allow people to reliably prevent this category of corruption for all of the documents they create and over time that’d become a majority in their field.

This would also offer the path for changing the default over time to safe by default. There will be more spreadsheets created in the future than exist now.

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

#143

Post by eigenket »

msh wrote: post #129
eigenket wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if the screwdriver sales guy takes your bosses bosses boss and their spouse out for a nice dinner, mysteriously leading to your org purchasing screwdrivers for everyone who is asking for a hammer to do their work then maybe the hypothetical craftsperson might start complaining. A ridiculously large number of people have excel installations and exactly zero budget to get access to a less shit tool.

Then blame their employer (especially if it's a billion dollar medical company) if they are so easily lead a stray.

More than one party can be at fault for a problem, Microsoft pretty explicitly sold their screwdriver as a hammer.

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

#144

Post by todorov84 »

Oh, come on.

Just format the range as text before pasting or importing the data (right-click -> format cells -> category = text). Text-formatted ranges don't convert input data.

The article also doesn't help saying that there is a toggle for implicit conversions. You want text, you preformat as text.

Just learn to use the damn thing before you bash it. Especially if it's your daily driver.

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

#145

Post by sparkie »

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?

You don't even need to do that. Just stick a single ' before any number/date and it will be treated as text.

The problems are when importing/exporting though. Even quoted numbers will lose the quote when exported to say, CSV. You need to explicitly save as quoted, and import quoted fields as text. The real issue is that these settings are not the default.

In LibreOffice (Save/Open CSV): https://imgur.com/a/ved7wgA

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

#147

Post by vegetable »

beAbU wrote: post #133
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?

This is a very unfair and harsh comment. In my current work, we deal with our user's national identity numbers quite frequently. This number is a 13 digit numerical number, that starts with your date of birth. So someone born on March 13 1989 will have a number start with 890913. People born in the aughts have "00" "01" "02" etc at the start of their ID number. We need to frequently generate excel and csv reports tha…

You should never double click to open a csv file in excel. You should ALWAYS import the file into excel. Set your types during import. Many of the complaints about excel's csv handling in this thread are user errors.

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

#148

Post by msh »

eigenket wrote: post #143
msh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then blame their employer (especially if it's a billion dollar medical company) if they are so easily lead a stray.

More than one party can be at fault for a problem, Microsoft pretty explicitly sold their screwdriver as a hammer.

Did they? My entire argument is wrong if Microsoft sold excel as a tool suited for genetic research.

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

#149

Post by papichulo2023 »

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.

Funny how you left out Java witch had the biggest fuck-up

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

#150

Post by mmcdermott »

vaylian wrote: post #128
shaan7 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Call it cynicism but I think humans just prefer things to be implicit. I agree with the implicit part, but not with the cynicism. Most human-to-human communication has implicit details, simply because there would otherwise be too many "obvious" details that need to be communicated. Suffice to say, humans tend to misunderstand each other when different assumptions are held and things can go horribly wrong. People li…

> I'm also annoyed when this happens. But then I say: This is what you requested. I can only work with the information that you provide to me.

I think it depends on the attitude of the person giving feedback. I generally find that digging into why this isn't what the user wanted is more illuminating. Tell me a story and I'll gain context and get more of the implicit details right going forward.

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