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Reading this just makes me incredibly sad. This feels so dumb and backwards... Why do people even still use excell at all?
I tend to use "less -Sx 20" to preview data files but try explaining that to a non-CLI user on Windows.
Quote: "There’s no easy fix, either. Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting..." What kind of loopy Excel variant the article's author is using? It's right there in settings, you can easy stop auto-formatting. Yes, default installation has it on, but it can be turned off.
From the article: > Even then, a scientist might fix their own data, but as soon as someone else opens the same spreadsheet in Excel without thinking, errors will be introduced all over again.
Or perhaps stop using Excel?
What’s the alternative?
The question I have is not about using spreadsheets, but why Excel? It takes way too long to load and the UI gets worse with every iteration. Most people don’t even use 99% of the features in Excel (Find and Replace amazes some people). It is headed on the same trajectory as the abomination of diagramming software known as Visio.
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Excel is not fundamentally suited, but it's fundamentally used. I wish you luck, but I long ago declared defeat against Excel. I can't prevent everyone from using it. I have come to accept that whatever Excel does is what I have to live with, because someone, somewhere out there hasn't heard the anti-Excel gospel yet.
Quantitative social science (which maybe a lot of comp bio people might regard as a "softer" science) has really made huge strides in moving this kind of analysis to R. Of course one person can't change it, but those with high status in the field can make a difference by leading the way and setting standards.
To people asking, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?" The whole world's data ultimately comes from or ends up in an Excel spreadsheet. Sure, we might use other intermediate data storage methods, but in the end it's going to go into some scientist's or some politician's computer, and by golly it's gonna be in Excel. Trying to rally against Excel is like trying to rally ag…
This accords with my experience. When I worked in clinical trial design/analysis, no one did their analyses in excel, but for initial data formatting and clean-up? /everything/ went through excel, even if the final cleanup was a python script. You’re not going to have the same ease of eyeballing your data in SPSS or SAS or R.
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> Excel is fundamentally not suited to analysing *omics data you are 100% correct. and yet it will continue to happen.
Yes, and? It should be a simple checklist item for any scientific journal to ask the author whether they used excel or not. If they say yes, reject the paper unless they can show their work hasn't been affected negatively by using excel.
Intellectually, it feels snobbish to single out Excel like this. I'm a software engineer in science, and I generally agree that scientists should learn some kind of coding. But you can make mistakes in Python or R as well - not to mention in physical experiments. We should check data and methods in general, not presume incompetence if people use one tool.
> For example, HECA used to have the gene name ‘headcase homolog (Drosophila),’ named after the equivalent gene in fruit fly, but we changed it to ‘hdc homolog, cell cycle regulator’ to avoid potential offense.” Ugh... everything is politics now.
You can get frustrated about that fact, or you can use it as an opportunity for learning about how and why that is so, and gain a deeper understanding of the tightly linked systems of power relationships all around you.
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> " To people calling, "why do they use Excel?" that's like asking "why must we be subjected to gravity?"" I respectfully disagree with this. Excel is fundamentally not suited to analysing *omics data. It's often the default program affiliated with a .csv filetype on people's computers, but trying to get an entire field of scientific research to rewrite itself based on its glorified bugs is...wrong, in my opinion. If…
Having Excel be the default for .csv files has caused me problems in the past as well with Excel automatically changing data when you open it. The unfortunate thing I have come across multiple times is a csv file that has some values with a lot of significant figures, i.e. 123456789876, 987654321234 After opening in Excel it will convert these to: 1.23E+11, 9.87E+11 Then resaving the file (as a csv) will store the va…
It's honestly amazing that Excel hasn't fixed this issue. It's pisses off an enormous number of users especially in basically any non-US country (even if 01/02 is a date, it isn't the second of January in most of the world...)