SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Scientists rename genes because Microsoft Excel reads them as dates:
Microsoft Excel’s automatic formatting is normally helpful for finishing spreadsheets quickly, but it’s proving to be an agent of chaos for geneticists. The Verge has learned that the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee has issued guidelines for naming human genes to prevent Excel’s automatic date formatting from altering data. MARCH1 (Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1), for example, should now be labeled MARCHF1 to stop Excel from changing it to 1-Mar.
The names of 27 genes have been changed in the past year to avoid Excel-related errors, HGNC coordinator Elspeth Bruford said. This isn’t a rare error, either, as Excel had affected about a fifth of genetics-related papers examined in a 2016 study.
Journal Reference:
Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, Assam El-Osta. Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature [open], Genome Biology (DOI: 10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @04:24AM (4 children)
No, it is not. It is like auto-play for disks and usb devices! It is a stupid default, which not being an actual de-fault, means it is a fault. As in, a bug, not a feature. This is why I do not use Excel. That and the telemetry.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by inertnet on Friday August 07 2020, @07:26AM (3 children)
The same is true for export to csv files. They have removed all the options for quotes and separators and such, so Excel became useless for that too. I sure hope that LibreOffice isn't going to copy that.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Friday August 07 2020, @11:57AM (1 child)
Of course they're going to, eventually. I fear at this point, people get paid more to sabotage LibreOffice than to improve it. It's been going down the drain since Version 5. The Mac version now is near unusable (I still run it, teeth-gnashingly). Their latest, greatest innovations include swapping out their graphics backend (what for?? it's not that their old backend could be the reason for the shitty performance with a couple of rectangles in a drawing) and changing the DOCX-version to current, so every peer receiving a DOCX now has to subscribe to Office 365.
With all that, I read that Michael Meeks of Collabora has been whining that it's not clear how to make a proper business case out of LO. That guy, in the amount of damage caused to FLOSS, is only second to Miguel de Icaza.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Muad'Dave on Friday August 07 2020, @12:12PM
Let's not forget Poettering [wikipedia.org] - he brought us winners like "... PulseAudio (2004), Avahi (2005), and systemd (2010)."
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @10:46PM
Only useless for the lazy... (and I do not like MS practices)
march1: easy fix type apostasy before it. That is it. Works for any string type field
CSV - god - MS GOT IT RIGHT to spec's IF you follow good standards (we hope sciencists can do that least!).
Dates and times pass as ISO standard not some local view.
Postal Codes - it is where still slight issue of 05001 goes to number 5001, but 05001-0001 goes to string. Again follow the rule of a apostasy.
Quotes are unneeded on strings, because it tells the difference (why above line is there). But if there is a comma in the string, then it quotes the string and changes any quotes to two quotes (shift in/shift out of buadit).
if you want tab sperators then save as .TAB vs .CSV.
Been passing TB of data this way for over 18 years now. Even automatic emailing report(s)/data for local use. Simple to write routine and call, and call, and call. Basically just a switch in report processing.