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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

#201

Post by jpindar »

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…

Same here, but with part numbers in electronics manufacturing. Excel also removes leading zeros from package names such as 0402.

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

#202

Post by FabHK »

fnbr wrote: post #160
tremon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no conventions that write a date as mm.dd.yyyy, so if you encounter a date in that format, it is safe to assume dd.mm.yyyy. Contrast this with the slash or dash notation, where both mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy are prevalent in the world. But 2020-08-06 is unambiguous in the same way that 06.08.2020 is: the only convention in common use is yyyy-mm-dd.

Unfortunately, this isn’t true in Canada. MDY is very common, especially in the English parts. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

MDY separated by dots? The link you gave does not seem to support that.

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

#203

Post by vikramkr »

A lot of people are attacking excel in this thread, just remember to give a fair share of the blame to people naming genes as well. These are meaningless names and changing them is frankly easier than changing a feature in excel (that the finance folk probably don't want changed). And its a good excuse to clear up some of the egregiously silly disease related names as well so we don't tell parents their kid is suffering from a debilitating mutation in luke-Skywalker-like upside-down cantaloupe 12b or whatever.

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

#204

Post by reportgunner »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #109
takluyver wrote: post #78

Programmers love to complain about Excel, but we happily use YAML, which has essentially the same footgun: certain strings (like 'on') need quoting if you don't want it to interpret them as something else.

YAML offers a simple solution though: just quote all one-word text and, more importantly, quote all text you don't manually write into the YAML file. Also, the main problem is that excel changes your input instead of just misinterpreting it. The difference being, the original will be gone.

> excel changes your input

That's a feature though. Coincidentally it only happens when you paste the data or if you messed up the generation of the file (didn't escape the column you want to leave untouched).

To me it seems like a case of you're holding it wrong. (which I don't wholeheartedly support)

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

#205

Post by dragonwriter »

tremon wrote: post #138
spuz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is "06.08.2020" unambiguous?

There are no conventions that write a date as mm.dd.yyyy, so if you encounter a date in that format, it is safe to assume dd.mm.yyyy. Contrast this with the slash or dash notation, where both mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy are prevalent in the world. But 2020-08-06 is unambiguous in the same way that 06.08.2020 is: the only convention in common use is yyyy-mm-dd.

> There are no conventions that write a date as mm.dd.yyyy

While slash is the most common, use of hyphens and dots as separators for US-style dates is not at all unheard of in the wild for manually formatted dates. The fact that it doesn't show up in lists of national “preferred formats” and doesn't tend to be commonly implemented as a prebaked format in software doesn't mean it's not a real thing people see and will interpret dates they see in light of.

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

#206

Post by whatisthiseven »

Balgair wrote: post #178
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…

In grad school I had a friend that was doing olfactory (smell) research on rats with tetrode drives (wires in their brain). He was looking at the neuronal response to smells that they gave the rats and had a few signals to match up. There was the signal from the arduino running the scent gates, the amps that reported the weak neuronal currents, the nose lasers that gated the ardunio, etc. He was having a hard time ge…

I keep seeing this sentiment when it comes to those in the natural sciences, but it makes no sense.

I could replace "programming" in your above little bit with "mathematics" and it would be just as weird.

Our modern world runs on computers and programs, just as our modern world and modern science built itself on mathematics and required many to use it. So too the new world of science may require everyone to know to program just as they know about the chemical composition of smells, or the particulars of differential equations, etc.

And I know your argument isn't "they shouldn't learn programming", but honestly since I keep seeing this same line of reasoning, I can't help but feel that is ultimately the real reasoning being espoused.

Science is getting harder, and its requirements to competently "find the exciting things" raises the bar each time. I don't see this as a bad thing. To the contrary, it means we are getting to more and more interesting and in-depth discoveries that require more than one discipline and specialty, which ultimately means more cross-functional science that has larger and deeper impacts.

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

#207

Post by arethuza »

jpindar wrote: post #201
dr_orpheus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Same here, but with part numbers in electronics manufacturing. Excel also removes leading zeros from package names such as 0402.

That also applies to phone numbers :-(

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

#210

Post by reportgunner »

danso wrote: post #175
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...)

I personally dislike this behavior in Excel, as I'm accustomed to working with plaintext data and using pandas/strftime to get datetimes as I need them. But I also figure that my situation as a technical user is likely in the minority, compared to people who are using spreadsheets every day to do manual data entry. That said, I completely agree with the tangential issue of U.S. dates being misleadingly different in f…

It's not just about data entry. Entering dates properly in excel allows you to calculate with dates.

If you want to know what date and time it will be 476 days and 12 hours from today you can just do =TODAY()+476.5

This is very useful when the requirement is to 'happen every 10 days' or you're looking for '30 days in the past'

Excel has a very low barrier of entry compared to pandas while boasting an immense amount of power and features. I think it was not an easy challenge to keep it going over the decades.

> US dates I'm a non-US person and I fixed this simply by changing my locale to enUS everywhere. It has an added benefit of not having weird translations of everything in random tools and excel functions not being localized to their cringy versions in my native tongue.

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