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Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

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Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#141

Post by airstrike »

LatteLazy wrote: post #108
airstrike wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just type '01/02 or ="01/02" and get on with your life

I think you've failed to grasp the issue, it's way more than just things I type sadly. It prevents the use csv files for many purposes. That stops excel users interacting with the wider ecosystem of file\data processing systems...

I think the reasoning is people type in "01/02" to actually mean Jan 2nd more often than they import CSVs into Excel. So Microsoft favored one over the other

I don't see a problem with that, as it's not undefined behavior – you know exactly how Excel will treat those values

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#142

Post by anthk »

BurningFrog wrote: post #79
jordigh wrote: post #7

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…

If the gravity metaphor doesn't reach you, maybe this will: The world speaks English. It's an illogical and absurdly spelled language. Esperanto is miles ahead on all logical measures. Yet we will never switch, both because the cost of switching is enormous, and because there is no way to coordinate/organize such a move.

I think Interlingua is better as a Spanish speaker.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#143

Post by jtdev »

vsareto wrote: post #99
LatteLazy wrote: post #26

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...)

>It's honestly amazing that Excel hasn't fixed this issue. I'm surprised there hasn't been a dotfile option added yet

Maybe a registry edit?

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#144

Post by meow1032 »

epistasis wrote: post #77
meow1032 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree completely with this, but just want to point out that it's kind of a bad smell to have computational biologists who are - as someone in the article puts it - computationally illiterate. I have met lots of these types over the years, and usually their methods are kind of a gong show. If you can't properly sanitize your data inputs on your column headers, why should I trust that you've treated the rest…

It's not usually computational biologists who are using Excel. What if you want to share data with a wetlab biologist who want to explore their favorite list of genes on their own?

There are lots of great computational biologists, but being a computational biologist doesn't necessitate being good with computers. Plenty of PI's rely pretty much exclusively on grad students and post-docs to run all their analyses.

Not that I'm saying using excel is bad either. I use excel plenty to look at data. But scientists need to know how to use the tools that they have.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#145

Post by brutt »

BurningFrog wrote: post #79
jordigh wrote: post #7

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…

If the gravity metaphor doesn't reach you, maybe this will: The world speaks English. It's an illogical and absurdly spelled language. Esperanto is miles ahead on all logical measures. Yet we will never switch, both because the cost of switching is enormous, and because there is no way to coordinate/organize such a move.

English as Lingua Franca (Language of Western Europe) is less than century old. My mother studied French, because it was dominant language of that time.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#147

Post by dustingetz »

meow1032 wrote: post #47
jordigh wrote: post #7

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…

I don't disagree completely with this, but just want to point out that it's kind of a bad smell to have computational biologists who are - as someone in the article puts it - computationally illiterate. I have met lots of these types over the years, and usually their methods are kind of a gong show. If you can't properly sanitize your data inputs on your column headers, why should I trust that you've treated the rest…

you shouldn't. Your own industry is totally dysfunctional, scaled beyond reason, little accountability beyond profits, and morally bankrupt. Why shouldn't every other industry be too?

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#148

Post by mellow2020 »

zapdrive wrote: post #20
yummypaint wrote: post #4

Why in the world is excel the application of choice? Last time I tried to use it (for much less complicated things than genetics), it choked and became unusable when the filesize exceeded about 6MB. I have yet to encounter a spreadsheet oriented task that isn't better implemented in gnumeric. Maybe we should also shorten all publications so adobe reader can display them without crashing?

Maybe you should ditch your Pentium 1 and buy a newer computer?

If the same machine can do it without hanging with better coded software, the hardware obviously isn't the problem.

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#149

Post by jbaber »

I don't see as pitiful that these non-technical* people can only use Excel.

I see as glorious that I'm able to get something close to real database tables out of non-technical people as long as they're in Excel.

I once populated a pretty sophisticated database by giving a bunch of computer semi-literate people Excel tables with only headers and simple instructions. They respected foreign key constraints, etc. that I could never have directly explained.

*in the software engineering way

Re: Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates

#150

Post by alach11 »

dr_orpheus wrote: post #69
azalemeth wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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…

This issue is common in the oil and gas industry. Wells are typically identified with a 14-digit number that Excel likes to convert to scientific notation and then truncate digits when saving to CSV.
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