81–90 of 518 posts
Or perhaps stop using Excel?
Excel is pretty efficient at ad-hoc text processing. You get real time feedback as you change rules and there are lots of handy functions to help you along. Its like a tabbed portable jupyter notebook.
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.
I see a few autoformatting options, but nothing corresponding to dates. The only options I see are similar to this:
https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2016/dec/how-to-...
I think another question is that why isn't there a viable alternative to excel for this particular use case? Is there, perhaps, a market for niche spreadsheet applications that serve one particular market?
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…
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.
> 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.
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.
The problem is that your average business user of Excel thinks type safety is a bug, not a feature. If Excel enforced types instead of guessing on your behalf, a lot of people would complain. And it would be really hard to explain why it is sometimes useful to have constraints to someone who normally sees Excel's flexibility as its main strength. I don't think I've ever seen a non coder use Excel in a sensible way: m…
On the other hand a ton of people that don't write software for a living and have no interest in code manage to produce things that help them do their job and automate a ton of tedious stuff.
My mind is blown that Excel's usability is so bad that the representation of the human genome itself has to adapt around it's undesired behaviour. As in, the history of genetics research is now irreversibly linked with the shortcomings of this one software product, which just happens to be incapable of describing the genetics of the organisms that created it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the article and parent is correct in part. However, equally the article touches on the fact that many people may use a spreadsheet and not all will be correctly trained to use their complex tools properly, in order to ensure data integrity. I consider this a failing not in software or Excel, but in education and professional standards. Scientists can be expected to understand and use their tools correctly, sin…
Is the simple renaming of 27 genes a good solve? I think it is. Any time you expect people to be trained, you’re planning for failure. Even a trained person can make a mistake or forget to do the manual steps. This eliminates the possibility.