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.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @04:24AM (7 children)
Scientists & Engineers!!
Please repeat after me:
Excel is a business tool, it's not for scientific or engineering calculations beyond the most simple sort that you might otherwise do manually. Spreadsheets in general are crap for precise work, we used to have problems with Lotus 1-2-3 as well.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @04:59AM (3 children)
Nice soap box! Now all you have to do is tell everyone in the whole world hundreds of times over and over again. That'll work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @12:09PM (2 children)
Actually, I only have to tell the engineers that work for me. Done (many years ago).
Here's an ancient page (amazing it's still live) that covers some Excel problems in a practical context:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/comptoolsExcel.html [fourmilab.ch]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @02:50PM (1 child)
So why the fuck are you telling me, shithead?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @05:37PM
Have you tried getting up on the other side of the bed?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 07 2020, @03:00PM (1 child)
Wah . . . wait . . . so you're saying, . . . er . . . I thought Excel was a database! The world's best database. Separate tables could be kept as sheets within a single XLSX workbook file.
Physician, heal thyself! Shoe salesman, heel thyself!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @03:10PM
Nonono.
Excel is electronic squared paper.
With badly designed squares, actually, that tend to change size over time.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday August 07 2020, @09:55PM
It's not even good for that. Unless you use a function that absolutely cuts off decimal places after calculating and rounding, you'll find it introduces random errors several decimal places down the line. Not a big deal when calculating totals overall, but if you are doing checks to make sure data is correct you'll find it showing errors because it stuck a 1 fifteen decimal places in. Of course, the harsh rounding also creates errors of its own. I can throw in an off topic complaint about the ribbon too, which slows me way down compared to drop down text menus, and when you toss having to subscribe to Office 365...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 07 2020, @04:26AM (24 children)
There was a time when a spreadsheet was used for it's intended purpose. Accounting, primarily.
Microsoft Excel has been adapted and adopted for all kinds of crazy crap that a spreadsheet was never meant for.
In this case, we're talking about SCIENCE??? And, SCIENTISTS can't make software more suitable to their purposes? We're doomed, I tell you. We're all going to die because science trusts Microsoft. They don't just trust Microsoft, they're tying themselves into knots to fit into Microsoft's square holes.
Idiots.
Biden approval rating falling below 30%!
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Friday August 07 2020, @04:50AM (22 children)
Spreadsheets are used for everything where I used to work. I started calling it "management by spreadsheet", because no matter what they needed, I had to put it in Google sheets.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Booga1 on Friday August 07 2020, @05:07AM (15 children)
It's because it makes nice charts and pretty colors.
Long ago I made an Excel spreadsheet that extracted all the data from our ticketing systems at work. Management then used that to decided who to fire when crunch time came. They simply picked the people who handled the least amount of cases and the lowest customer feedback scores. Unfortunately, those were all our best people. They were the ones that were able to handle the toughest cases and naturally they took longer and generally involved the angriest customers. So your reward for being the best at your job was being fired. I seriously regret ever making that spreadsheet. Had I only known....
Anyway, back to the subject at hand, this shouldn't be an issue at all. You can tell Excel to treat the cells as plain text. This is a user education issue. The fact that they're changing their naming guidelines because people can't be bothered to change a setting in a program is rather depressing to think about.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by krishnoid on Friday August 07 2020, @05:15AM (4 children)
And hence, probably the highest paid, so win-win for management. One would then hope the angriest customers got escalated straight to management, a few months [notalwaysright.com] after which, they'll figure out that maybe they shouldn't have gotten rid of them.
In a way, this all boils down to people selecting services based on cost, marketing, features, etc. rather than support and product quality. If there was a culture of evaluating those things prior to purchase, I bet things would start changing.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Friday August 07 2020, @05:43AM (2 children)
Yep, nailed it right off the bat there. That's pretty much how it went. It was like watching some sort of real life video game where management thought they could just trust the numbers to tell them all they needed to know about the people working for them and how things were going. The realization did come months later as the time to solve cases got worse and so did the customer feedback scores. By the time management realized what was going on, it was too late. Anyone who saw what happened to the good workers moved on, leaving us with the mediocre and true underperformers to try and save the contract. Of course, that didn't work and the remaining team of 50+ people had to be let go when we lost the contract.
BTW, that notalwaysright link you included was pretty "good" in the usual way those stories go. So many messed up stories on there...
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday August 07 2020, @06:40AM (1 child)
W. Edwards Deming is frequently misquoted [deming.org] as having said that you can only manage what you can measure. He was talking about quality, but customer support/satisfaction seems like it should be another one of those things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @02:59PM
"Measure" these days is just more bullshit busywork in the form of self-eval questionaires that you dump on the losers, I mean workers. Then hand it off to "AI" or "Excel" to sort the list. As someone above already mentioned, your best people often don't score well on busywork measures.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday August 07 2020, @08:32AM
Not if by then they moved to another company (being able to show a “positive” past performance because the negative consequences didn't yet show up). The managers that replaced them then have to deal with the situation (and probably get all the blame because, after all, it's during their time that the shit hit the wall — never mind that the previous managers set the shit in motion).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @12:15PM (6 children)
> I made an Excel spreadsheet that extracted all the data from our ticketing systems ...
What I take away from this sad-but-typical story is that your spreadsheet wasn't complete, it didn't include data about the difficulty of each problem and the skills/experience required to solve it. Perhaps this wasn't in the ticketing system, but with hindsight it should have been created somehow.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 07 2020, @02:07PM (4 children)
You can't just create data. You can create fake information, but that's not the same thing. If the data isn't in the system, you can't create it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @05:42PM (3 children)
And yet, back to GPs story, the smart/productive members of the team got laid off. Ostensibly for reasons that were based on the presentation of the ticket data in Excel format.
So what is the way forward in this situation? Not being sarcastic. Just wondering if that fateful spreadsheet could have been done differently.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Booga1 on Friday August 07 2020, @07:11PM (2 children)
What I think should have been done differently in my opinion would have been to talk to the team leads about why certain people had poor stats. Who did they consider to be the most trustworthy and skilled team members and why. I was one of about ten team leads and they did not talk to any of us about any part of the upcoming layoffs at all.
Part of the problem was policy based. Management policy required ALL service outage cases to be assigned to one agent to do all the customer callbacks once service was restored. Team leads would pick the best sweet talking agents with nerves of steel to handle all those angry customers. That meant a single person called back dozens of angry customers and received all the negative feedback for it. People who handled outage cases were the first to be fired because "they had poor customer service skills."
The "slow" agents were in the second round of layoffs. Difficult cases were given to people you could trust to solve them. Anyone can handle a password reset, but only a few could handle complex database issues requiring deep dives into corrupted mailboxes to save a customer's important business data. Someone who knocked out 100 password resets had awesome stats and looked great on paper, but would never be able to solve a single one of the toughest technical cases. As part of that, agents that did the hardest work looked like the slowest and they were let go.
Now, all that said, cases were divided into somewhat rough but reasonable categories. To address the issues with the spreadsheet itself would have required management to assign a weight to those categories. Unfortunately they did not. It still would have only solved half the problem since categories weren't really detailed enough to tell the difference between "I can't access mail because my Outlook profile is messed up" and "I can't access mail because the database got messed up during a catastrophic server failure that required a restore from backup." Any grading for difficulty of a case would be somewhat arbitrary, but it still would have been better than treating all cases as equal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @11:34PM (1 child)
My wife worked at a small (100-ish) employee place where the owner cared about the employees (family picnics, etc.), but then he sold out to a huge company and retired. They then brought in a new CEO from halfway across the country who was cut right out of the shitty napolean complex MBA CEO types. She even brought her best friend along and put her as the HR head, but of course this person wasn't an actual employee, but she ran her own small company, so HR was suddenly run by a contractor. But my story isn't about the morally and legally corrupt goings on (you used to be able to see a lot of examples of that posted on Glassdoor, at least until they started requiring employees to post 5-star ratings), but when she came in, they clumsily did that 1-2-3 rating thing, where they would get rid of you if you got a 3, etc. It was all the rage about 10 years or more ago because "Jack Welch did it, so if I'm going to be recognized as a great CEO, I'm going to do it too". What was hilarious was that they made the managers rate everybody, but in the end there was confusion whether it was the "1" or the "3" that was bad. It was all just an excuse to get rid of people "legally" by claiming they were poor performers. It sounds like that is what was going on here. It didn't matter how well the spreadsheet reflected reality, they just needed a crutch to justify reducing headcount (which means reduced costs, which means bigger CEO bonus!).
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday August 08 2020, @12:22AM
I could understand that being the case in a lot of situations. Ours was different. The problems were not due to a management change or corporate buyout. Our collapse was in no small part related to the economic downturn at the time. Getting rid of the highest paid people was probably part of it, as krishnoid mentioned above. It was definitely not about manager/CEO bonuses since eventually the whole contract was canceled and everyone on that contract was let go, managers included. So, everybody got the chopping block eventually, but the spreadsheet was just used to make the cuts in ways that made very little sense to any of us(as team leads).
Only a couple of very small side contracts that had no overlap with ours survived.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @03:04PM
> it didn't include data about the difficulty of each problem and the skills/experience required to solve it
Oh cool. Just add a few more pages to the self-eval forms.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Jay on Friday August 07 2020, @04:20PM (1 child)
You can sometimes tell excel to treat the cells as plain text. And sometimes it's somehow magically already changed not just the formatting, but THE ACTUAL DATA IN THE CELLS so that when you tell it to change to plain text, it gives you the plain-text of the date format it "helpfully" converted your data to.
I don't know if this is a recent bug or a "feature", but I've run into it twice lately. It was absolutely mind-blowing to see data turned into dates, force the dates to plain text, and be left with the dates in the same format. Cutting and pasting into notepad got me the dates, showing it was the underlying data at that point!
I've taken to reading and writing all .csvs in R, because I just don't trust excel to not mangle the data, even when explicitly told how to handle it.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Friday August 07 2020, @06:35PM
It seems that you're not alone running into this. A recent question on Super User [superuser.com] was having trouble with CSV imports being treated differently than they used to be.
Looks like there is an option to force it back to the old way according to this answer: https://superuser.com/a/1574923/897970 [superuser.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @10:10PM
In all fairness, you probably should have seen it coming, what else were they going to do with that data?
(Score: 2) by drussell on Friday August 07 2020, @05:26AM (5 children)
Indeed... Spreadsheets are intended to be electrified ledgers.
Sadly, I've seen them used for far to many insane purposes.... (facepalm)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Friday August 07 2020, @06:41AM (2 children)
That's the problem with a powerful, flexible, reliable tool -- once the hackers get their hands on it, it will be used for purposes you never anticipated.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Friday August 07 2020, @03:26PM (1 child)
Hackers getting their hands on a spreadsheet is not a problem.
The problem is MBAs getting their hands on a spreadsheet.
* OMG! Excel is the best database evar!
* OMG! I can write VBA macros!
* I'm now the greatest programmer evar!
* I can write separate "query" functions to search the rows of each table for the row I want!
* It's fast and efficient! Even on HUGE databases that have HUNDREDS of rows!!!
* I don't see what's the big deal about "complexities" that my programmers complain about. It's all so easy!
Physician, heal thyself! Shoe salesman, heel thyself!
(Score: 3, Touché) by krishnoid on Friday August 07 2020, @05:46PM
* Ok, maybe this is starting to get a more complex
* Now that I've shown results and head to greener pastures, I'm can dump this pile of technical debt off onto some nerd
* So long, everyone
* Wow, this MBA stuff is easy!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 07 2020, @03:21PM (1 child)
Electrocuting bean counters doesn't sound so insane.
Physician, heal thyself! Shoe salesman, heel thyself!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday August 07 2020, @05:47PM
Brings new meaning to the term 'protected' cells. Click on the wrong one and your mouse zaps you. I like it!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MostCynical on Friday August 07 2020, @05:00AM
Most schools, colleges, and even research facilities, are run by managers, who are bureaucrats.
Budgets, bulk purchasing, licenses, software, hardware.. are all too hard for scientists to manage WHILE DOING SCIENCE..
This means that the people that buy the software ARE NOT the scientists, and, if the scientists ask for particular software it will almost certainly be expensive - and therefore not approved.
Worse: scientists, before they become scientists, are students, and before that, school students - all they may know is "excel", as they haven't ever seen anything else..
hammer/nails...
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @04:56AM (1 child)
My covid swab took less than two days then got put in excel. The IFU they gave me specifically says it is not to be used for diagnosis and may return positive results if the testee has recently been infected or vaccinated.
The "authorities" put these results into excel and only god knows what comes out the other end.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Friday August 07 2020, @05:52PM
I bet someone accidentally enables John Conway's Game of Life [bitstorm.org] on it and your positive test result starts spreading to adjacent rows and columns. Here's hoping some of the cells [sic] develop antibodies through exposure so they can start disabling the infected ones soon enough.
(Score: 5, Funny) by drussell on Friday August 07 2020, @05:23AM (4 children)
They don't know how to enter "MARCH1" instead of just MARCH1 to force it to be literal text?!!
You don't even have to manually change the cell formatting type, you can just put it in quotes.
WTF?!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @12:19PM
Exactly.
At this point you are modded +4 Funny, but I'd really like to see a "sad but true" mod in this case.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 07 2020, @02:20PM (1 child)
Who's entering the data? If it's a grad student, you've got a point. If it's a secretary, much less so. A good secretary could understand that, but the average one couldn't. If it's a temp, it's not a reasonable point at all.
To a programmer putting things in quotes is a reasonable approach. Many others can learn that....but many also can't or see no reason to.
In a good system, the data would be entered into a program that preprocessed the data so that it was sanitized against errors. This field is for genes, that field is for dates, each must be filled with the appropriate data. And one can set up that kind of front end for excel (or one could a couple of decades ago). But raw excel doesn't have that kind of sanitation, and it CAN'T. And quick data entry can't be rapidly constructed. (I only built one of those front ends once, so I can't really guess the extra time, but I'd guess a week to build and test the front end if you were experienced at it.) But how many labs these days have a person on staff who's experienced at that kind of job? (And actually more important, how many don't?)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @10:15PM
The real solution is for Microsoft to just fix their software. It's trivial to set up a cell to display as a date without messing with the underlying data. There's numerous formatting options available.
The default should be to leave the data alone and display it as entered unless the user intervenes. Under no circumstance should it do smart things. MS doesn't do smart, well, unless it's smart for a group of crackheads. The only programmers I've encountered that are dumber are the ones that Google employs working on their products. OMG are those people stupid. Even basic functionality tends to be broken beyond belief most of the time.
(Score: 1) by pD-brane on Thursday August 20 2020, @10:50AM
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @05:42AM
My dates have lead to bad genes also.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @07:13AM (3 children)
Gene names are IMHO a large clusterf*ck anyway. If you track gene names between different species they can differ. To complicate it even futher the same name can also indicate a different, related gene in that same other species.
To illustrate:
Species 1 has gene x and y
Species 2 has gene x and z
Gene x in species 1 is gene z in species 2
Gene y in species 1 is gene x in species 2
Species 3 has gene x and z, but are totally unrelated to the genes in species 1 and 2.
In this case genes are considered similar if they encode a gene with the same protein function (and behaves the same) or have a comparable genetic markup (and are thus considered related).
Disclamer: I've worked on research with such genes.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 07 2020, @02:54PM (2 children)
Yes, they're quite confused. There's probably no way to avoid it, though. It's better to think of them as nicknames than as names. They started off as "coded functional descriptors", but that was sort of iffy from the beginning. "eyeless" for a gene that was necessary to function correctly to create eyes...but not the only gene that needed to function correctly. And then they got abbreviated. So a gene got a name because of what you noticed broke when it broke...but that may have only indirect connection to it's most important use. And different species use the same gene in slightly (or grossly) different ways.
It's probably better to think of a single gene as being the collection of alleles that are used within a species to handle a particular job. But the only real description of that is a set of gene sequences, and that's too bulky to be convenient. So genes are talked of using their nicknames, and you've got to expect a bunch of overlaps and alternatives, with different alternatives preferred in different contexts.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @07:58PM
I prefer gene numbers, like it is done in Arabidopsis thaliana: AtG
It's not perfect, but better than gene names (which are used textually in articles (and preferably not in data sets) as well, but are always referenced back to the gene number.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @10:17PM
I failed genetics because of that silliness. The teacher wasn't available to explain what the various traits we were supposed to be breeding for looked like and there wasn't any good pictures provided either. Even most of the other students didn't seem to know which fruit flies were in which containers and they certainly couldn't explain what to look for either. If you're a geneticist that's used to working with the species in question, that may be obvious, but trying to breed for those results without knowing what the traits look like is literally impossible based only on the name.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday August 07 2020, @10:06AM
I was going to roll my eyes and mumble about life sciences, but then I remembered an anecdote - a physicist colleague of mine used excel to do the data analysis in his thesis. That would be somewhat tragic, were it not for the fact that he is a C programmer who wrote his own compiler for fun and (successfully) took an undergraduate degree in CompSci because he was bored by high school. I wonder if he had any data points converted to dates in his thesis...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @10:52AM (2 children)
There is nothing helpful about a tool (ostensibly) designed for data analysis and manipulation that applies it's own transformations to the data without any user interaction.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @12:47PM (1 child)
"It looks like you're trying to edit genes...Would you like help?"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 07 2020, @03:30PM
Microsoft product would say:
"It looks like you are trying to edit Jeans...Wood you like help?"
Physician, heal thyself! Shoe salesman, heel thyself!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by datapharmer on Friday August 07 2020, @11:38AM (8 children)
I'm no Excel evangelist, but the problem they are describing means they are using the tool incorrectly. It is vitally important to define your cell formats based on the data that is in them. Not doing so leaves Excel to guess what type of data is in the cell - like a date... If they can't be trusted to know to set Format -> Text what other horrible mistakes are they making during their analysis? I'd venture to guess they are also missing values that don't add up as expected due to Excel storing and processing in Binary such as =1*(0.5-0.4-0.1) doesn't equal 0. This is dangerous to science and anyone using Excel needs at least some basic training on how to use it properly and what it's limitations are.
(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?
(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.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @04:48PM
Maybe it's just me, but it's not that easy. I've lost count of the number of times I've set the cell format to text, tried to copy in a number like 111112222244444, and Excel STILL "helpfully" transforms it to 1.11E+14. Now that I'm trying it now it's working, but I swear it's broken in the past.
All I'm trying to say is that it's not as easy as "just use the tool right, lul."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @05:50PM (1 child)
What is the average years of experience of programmers on the Excel team at MS? I'm thinking that there rookie errors on the programming side, as well as rookie users. Sort of a "blind leading the blind" scenario?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @10:22PM
Probably something like a year and a half. IIRC, MS switched to a policy of basically only having contract workers for most of these positions and then terminating the contract every year and a half or so. The end result is that there's very little institutional knowledge. This shouldn't be surprising as most of their products suck donkey dick. And not just dick, but balls as well. They used to have a UI that actually made sense and people would not notice after the first bit, but these days, that's no longer the case. They made it pretty as in pretty terrible.