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I studied bioinformatics in university back in 2005, and the first subject we were trained on was not Python or Java, but using Excel. Our teachers explicitly told us about excel's conversions to dates and other pitfalls. I find it mind-boggling that some researchers still made these mistakes 10 years later. Excel is a wonderful tool. But you need to learn your tools and find out about possible footguns.
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Haranguing your users not to make mistakes is utterly worthless. The only way to move the needle is to design systems that are easier to use correctly.
> The only way to move the needle is to design systems that are easier to use correctly. If you do it like most software vendors do, by simplifying and removing functionality, you're moving the needle in the wrong direction .
Ideally on the screen UI only those things are shown, that are relevant in the context.
And the context of beginners is very small, so they don't need to see advanced tools they never will use anyway. But for sure it is not the right way to also remove the tools for the advanced users who do need them.
But it is possible to make UIs that can be customized ..
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You think Excel should make special accommodations because genetics authors misuse it? Excel has been acting this way since before bioinformatics existed. Authors need to use their tools properly.
They already did in 2023. Excel did not have an option for turning automatic conversions off. You can now, FINALLY disable automatic conversion. Honestly that "feature" has been a bane of my existence, and I don't work with genes.
I’d love to know the percentage of corrupted data across all Excel workbooks.
At work we have had problems with excel changing values of numerical entries due to different locale formatting multiple times in the past, and many times causing hours of lost time till the culprit (excel) was found. Other types of values that are completely inconvenient for excel include social security numbers and phone numbers; which one would assume are more general purpose and thus closer to the standard use ca…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think Excel should make special accommodations because genetics authors misuse it? Excel has been acting this way since before bioinformatics existed. Authors need to use their tools properly.
Excel (and GSheets) are tools where I think a stripped down "trust my input, I know what I'm doing" mode that doesn't try to intuit user intent would be useful. As I type this comment and my phone miscorrects "intuit" to "Intuit," I think also Google keyboard could benefit from such a mode that only handles spelling mistakes but doesn't replace uncommon words with common brands, etc.
-3^2
I don't have a recent copy of Excel to check this in, but this was the case in the '97 version. I just tried it in the current LibreOffice calc, and it returns "9". My guess is that one of the early spreadsheets messed up the order of precedence, and everybody after copied it for compatibility.
On the other hand, I just tried maxima and python and they both give "-9".
I wonder if this particular problem afflicts people who copy formulas from (say) math books into spreadsheets.
Almost all reasonable engineers see that there is something wrong with such an approach. But almost all everyday computer users think that this is the way computing has to be.
Sometimes I wonder why even I voluntarily open it for certain tasks - anyway, despite all the criticism, Excel has reached the Lindy[1] threshold for me and is here to stay.