Humanity renamed genes because of Excel

#1

Post by kegenaar » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

Humanity renamed genes because of Excel
davidemornatta.it

Re: Humanity renamed genes because of Excel

#2

Post by Eswo » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 1:23 PM UTC

super cool story!

Re: Humanity renamed genes because of Excel

#3

Post by uberman » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

We run into a similar issue all the time were certain social media APIs return ids as strings that look like very long numbers. When opened by non-technical researchers and (invariably) overwritten by them, these ids will have been converted into scientific notation by Excel with the resulting loss of precision rendering the ids useless.

We now do a cleaning step prior to handing data to researchers where "id_" is prepended to the field to prevent Excel from casting these integer strings to 1.23E10

Re: Humanity renamed genes because of Excel

#4

Post by kegenaar » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

uberman wrote: post #3

We run into a similar issue all the time were certain social media APIs return ids as strings that look like very long numbers. When opened by non-technical researchers and (invariably) overwritten by them, these ids will have been converted into scientific notation by Excel with the resulting loss of precision rendering the ids useless. We now do a cleaning step prior to handing data to researchers where "id_" is pr…

Thank you for the comment! It's exactly the same kind of problem and I am sure it feels so frustrating having to use these workarounds