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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

#91

Post by ethanbond »

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.

Also... Excel is great. What exactly is "ahead" of Excel? People on here really underestimate how great of a product Excel is because of its cultural affiliations.

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

#92

Post by epistasis »

pas wrote: post #65
appleflaxen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That doesn't solve the analysis problem downstream when a non-expert is getting started, doesn't know about Excel's anti-features, and starts doing analysis using the only tool that the world has ever told them is acceptable for tabular data.

Ideally excel would change, but since we know it won't, and we want to work with lots of people with minimal problems, we must adapt.

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

#94

Post by glofish »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #43
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…

>based on its glorified bugs If someone types MARCH1, DEC1, OCT4, SEPT1 into a column, why should Excel not treat these as dates? Probably 99.999% of users would prefer this auto-understanding. To make users have to then select cell formatting and select date is a terrible UI decision. It's odd to call such a useful feature a bug. >Excel is fundamentally not suited to analysing *omics data But it's excellent for a ma…

It is shortsighted to call this behavior a "useful feature". It was and is a grave and serious mistake.

Automatically converting SEPT1 to a date caused far more damage than the benefit of the fleeting convenience.

The damage that this "feature" caused and will keep causing goes far beyond the domain of bioinformatics.

Even in bioinformatics things have not been "solved", for the next decade the same gene will have two names when looking it up in previously published data.

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

#96

Post by Duller-Finite »

aden1ne wrote: post #63
Duller-Finite wrote: post #8

Excel isn't the program of choice for most scientists and computational biologists, who typically use R, python, or command line tools. However, we often get data from other scientists or reanalyze data from other groups that can have these errors. It's so frequent of a problem that there are scientific papers about it [1]. [1] https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...

This ignores the reality that one will ultimately have to interact with people who have no understanding of any of these tools. Unless you happen to work in a pure computational biology group, one _will_ have to interact with lab workers, biologists with no training (or understanding of) in R or python, doctors, etc. All these people will know excel.

That's why I'm in favor of this change in nomenclature.

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

#97

Post by Joker_vD »

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.

Malplezure, vi pravas :( Sed la espero neniam mortas plene.

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

#98

Post by jmkjaer »

ynodir wrote: post #49

Havent read the article, but come on. Tools should serve us, not the other way around. It'd be enough just to change the affected cells' type.

> Havent read the article

Please do. The article has a paragraph that addresses this.

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

#99

Post by vsareto »

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

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

#100

Post by gameswithgo »

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…

it would be nice if everyone was expert at everything, but they cant be. it would be nice if they hired experts but money doesn’t grow on trees. we often insist on a degree of excellence we refuse to pay for
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