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An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors

washingtonpost.com

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Re: An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors

#71

Post by leaningtower »

IndianAstronaut wrote: post #64
madaxe_again wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At university, we were forbidden from using Excel, and only FORTRAN 77 was allowed. At the time, this seemed strange and anachronistic, but when you consider that it had been in use for 25 years at the time, and was a known quantity that didn't have strange and unknown bugs, it actually seems sensible in retrospect. I do however recall being mightily annoyed that I was having to calculate ephemera in "arcane bullshit…

A company I worked for banned Excel for analysis and made everyone use Ipython notebooks because the analysis was transparent and very easily repeatable.

You can share your Excel files and macros with other people too. Python notebooks are kind of cool but if you need something quickly to sift through the data to have an idea, Excel is an amazingly good tool for it

Re: An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors

#72

Post by leaningtower »

cm2187 wrote: post #24
dagaci wrote: post #12

First I thought this story was about math and numerical errors. But it's actually about auto- formatting and auto-correction. "Excel automatically converting gene names to things like calendar dates or random numbers" In this case, I think what is needed is some kind of rudimentary knowledge of data-types. Or perhaps more simply a scientific template which is actually plain text by default. But how are people not not…

The worst with these formatting is that Excel will behave differently in different regions. Another headache in large international corporations/collaborations.

But that's an advantage too. As a non English-native user, I like when companies care about my language and culture and they do not stick dates to the MM-DD-YYYY format that is used by Americans only. Yes, of course, we should all go for YYYY-MM-DD... fine by me, but now you go telling my mom :¬)

Re: An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors

#74

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35
SNvD7vEJ wrote: post #13

Why is the auto-convert 'features' in Excel not opt-in? When Excel encounters the first cell in a new sheet that it thinks should be auto-converted, why does it not ask if that is desirable for that sheet? Like: "Do you want Excel to interpret and auto-convert all strings with format into the type in this sheet?" At least for conversions where the original data is lost.

I don't think Excel ever destroys the underlying data. It simply layers formatting over it. One can override by specifying custom formatting, or opt out by selecting all cells and setting their format to text.

[deleted]
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