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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: 2) by looorg on Friday August 07 2020, @12:47PM (1 child)
The auto-formatting of cells is quite annoying tho. I almost wish the program would just store it as typed for a bit and then have a popup asking what it should format it as if you have not set it up before you started. That it converts almost everything to dates that have to do with numbers is annoying, but I still find it even more annoying when it removes initial zeroes from the input. That is unbelievably annoying.
But Excel have come quite a long way from just being a basic spreadsheet. There are now functions in there, or you can write your own, to do pretty much everything you previously requires a statistical software package for. The thing is for a Microsoft program it's actually quite snappy and fast and sort of lends itself to doing basic data wrangling and sanitation before you import the data into a statistics program of you choice (either one of the big suits or if you just write your own in R, Python or whatever). The weird thing as I noted is that you shouldn't really have to as almost all those tools are already in Excel these days. But in some sense it has almost become a de facto tool for it as almost every computer has it installed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 08 2020, @06:33PM
Look at all the idiots here saying the auto feature shouldn't on by default.
That auto thing works fine for 90% of the cases for 80% of the population, who we all should know are stupid people that wouldn't be able to remember how to set a column to a date type even to save their life.
The problem here is a corner/fringe case where the auto thing is not working fine for people who are supposedly significantly smarter than the stupid people. Y'know geneticists aka scientists?
Maybe these smart people should use their supposedly above average brains to learn how to use Excel properly?