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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @01:04PM (2 children)
No, the problem is that Excel is trying to guess what your data formats are. There should be a nice big button to turn that off, as there should be for any "auto" feature in the whole Office suite. What they do now is Clippy without the annoying animation.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday August 07 2020, @05:57PM (1 child)
They *should* have a group policy so it can be turned off centrally for all PCs in the Life Sciences AD group. Still, it's not the worst thing to happen -- better that gene names get converted to dates rather than numbers get rounded or tweaked.
Hmm ... someone should write a lint-like utility for the journals to run on submitted Excel spreadsheets to catch possible errors of this sort, as a pre-pass before human review.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @10:20PM
It shouldn't be there to begin with. This is the same nonsense as that stupid ribbon UI that ensures that you never have all the tools you need in an easily accessible place. The most common ones are on the ribbon and fuck if I know where any of the other ones are as there's no internal logic to the placement of things. The previous system was quite logical, there were only a couple places where most functions could plausibly be located and as long as you knew a function existed you could quickly find it. And for anything commonly used, there was a hotkey associated with it. The ribbon is completely worthless and required huge sums of money to retrain people who previously knew how to use the software effectively.
Being an employee of MS should be a disqulifier to work anywhere other than Google, the only company with even worse programmers.