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One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

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Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#191

Post by CivBase »

dmvdoug wrote: post #181
zelphirkalt wrote: post #139

Know your tools. When I see such headlines, I feel sad about the state of this world and obstacles to progress, angry about the stupidity of designing all the tools for the most lazy of users, and at the same time I also laugh about the failures of proprietary software and its users, who could easily have invested a little bit of time to learn alternatives, but apparently chose not to. Yes the tooling they use might…

Yes, tools are not made for users but for the tool-builders. Everyone else must adapt!

Excel is made for spreadsheets, not databases. Microsoft already has a database application in Access.

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#192

Post by itchyjunk »

dmvdoug wrote: post #181
zelphirkalt wrote: post #139

Know your tools. When I see such headlines, I feel sad about the state of this world and obstacles to progress, angry about the stupidity of designing all the tools for the most lazy of users, and at the same time I also laugh about the failures of proprietary software and its users, who could easily have invested a little bit of time to learn alternatives, but apparently chose not to. Yes the tooling they use might…

Yes, tools are not made for users but for the tool-builders. Everyone else must adapt!

A single tool must work for ever use case or should the tool be picked based on the use case? Tool X doesn't work for use case Y. Regardless of where you shift the blame, tool X doesn't work for use case Y holds.

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#193

Post by Djdjur7373bb »

theodpHN wrote: post #44

So, the question is: Would there be fewer or more errors if something other than Excel was used? Has much rigorous research been done on this?

One should probably also ask how much research would not have gotten done or other issues that would crop up if less tech-savvy researchers didn't have a beginner friendly tool like Excel available.

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#194

Post by benrutter »

I know that the "anything" goes nature of excel is part of what makes it such a universally reached for tool, but every time I see sonething like this, I think that there would be a clear use case for a more restrictive spreadsheet.

9/10 spreadsheets are tables, but because they're spreadsheets they inherit the behaviour of "no conistent behaviour in columns, everything is independent and different".

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#195

Post by HenryBemis »

dehugger wrote: post #71
tengwar2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you actually do know what you are doing, you know to set the cell type appropriately.

Yes, of course. Every cell as type "Text" so it doesnt screw up everything I paste... The real problem is the behavior of the default "General" type, which actually means "guess at every value and ham up all my data." I frequently have to paste in strings which consist of 0 prefixed number ids. I know very well to make sure the column is text before pasting, but other users don't always remember and frequently get th…

I get all the points made (and the many more not included).

The point is that Excel works great for 99% of the people and for 99% of the use-cases. I am a heavy excel user, for my financial planning, work, etc. And it pisses me off when I see a column that should be "networkdays" (working days) becoming $ or getting decimals, but hey, you take the bad with the good.

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#196

Post by zamadatix »

benrutter wrote: post #194

I know that the "anything" goes nature of excel is part of what makes it such a universally reached for tool, but every time I see sonething like this, I think that there would be a clear use case for a more restrictive spreadsheet. 9/10 spreadsheets are tables, but because they're spreadsheets they inherit the behaviour of "no conistent behaviour in columns, everything is independent and different".

You can set the format of the column when making a table. Much more than that and you've ended up at Access. The problem here with Excel is it's wonky default until you've made that explicit choice.

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#197

Post by bikenaga »

shagie wrote: post #93
bikenaga wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe something's wrong with my terminal. In dc: 3 _ 2 ^ p gives 0 _3 2 ^ p gives 9 3 2 ^ _ p gives 0 5 _ p gives 0 _5 p gives -5 You didn't intend that I should get those zeros, right?

~ % dc -v dc 6.5.0 Copyright (c) 2018-2023 Gavin D. Howard and contributors Report bugs at: https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. ~ % dc 3 _ 2 ^ p 9 _3 2 ^ p 9 3 2 ^ _ p -9 5 _ p -5 _5 p -5 (control-D) The version that I have appears to have _ parsed as an operator in addition to the negation of a numeric constant.

I'm using the version from Debian testing:

    dc -V
    dc (GNU bc 1.07.1) 1.4.1
In fact, in my version "-v" as opposed to "-V" isn't recognized as a valid option.

    3 _ 2 ^ p
    0

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#198

Post by thebytefairy »

AStonesThrow wrote: post #136
v1ne wrote: post #134

We have a saying in German: A bad worker always blames their tools. Excel has many quirks, but I'm still very grateful that it exists, for quickly putting together some numbers and still being able to change the inputs to my formulas.

That's interesting. In English, the idiom is: "It's a poor artist who blames his tools."

As a native English speaker, I've actually only heard 'a bad workman blames his tools', not the artist form. Now that I google it, did you mean craftsman? I don't see any references to artist.

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#199

Post by asjir »

v1ne wrote: post #134

We have a saying in German: A bad worker always blames their tools. Excel has many quirks, but I'm still very grateful that it exists, for quickly putting together some numbers and still being able to change the inputs to my formulas.

In Polish we have: a bad ballerina is hindered by the hem of her skirt

Re: One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Excel (2016)

#200

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

zmgsabst wrote: post #180
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (0-3)^2? It’s entirely unambiguous due to the parenthesis. I don’t think the rest of your argument actually makes sense. There is no sleight of hand required. The original argument is entirely related to having unary minus and binary minus which are different operators conceptually have similar precedence as being less surprising.

My point is that you can’t define “-3” as “0-3” to make it work: you’re assuming exactly what’s being debated (via sleight of hand) when you insert the terms with brackets in the way you do rather than the way I do. When you try to swap in the unary operator without that to make it “less surprising”, you get 9. Precisely what you said was wrong about the unwary operator (in Excel).

But no one is defining -3 as (0-3). You are entirely missing the point. I am going to quote myself again:

> The original argument is entirely related to having unary minus and binary minus which are different operators conceptually have similar precedence as being less surprising.

And no, you don’t get 9 when you swap the unary operator. That’s the whole point and why it’s surprising that Excel did reverse the precedence for implementation easiness.

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